Via Anthony Di Paola and Salma El Wardany in bloomberg.com: The kingdom is already in talks to buy stakes in companies in China and the state-run Saudi Aramco has said it wants more deals this year and the next. Investing in plants that produce chemicals — which Riyadh sees as a driver of growth of future oil demand — as a way to ensure it has a ready market for its vast crude supply. “We will be using oil to chemicals, domestically and abroad, and that’s why you see us, or you see Aramco investing a lot in China and we will be investing a lot everywhere else on planet Earth,” Saudi Arabia Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz Bin Salman said at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh. “In this room in 2019, I did say we will monetize every molecule of energy this land has. Period.”
