Climate Lobbying Overview: Saudi Aramco (Aramco) appears to support top-line climate targets and ambition, however it has also engaged with limited climate change policies with a negative effect. Additionally, Aramco does not appear to fully support the energy transition and has advocated for the continued role of fossil fuels in the future energy mix.

Top-line Messaging on Climate Policy: Saudi Aramco appears to show mixed top-line messaging on climate policy. On its corporate website, accessed in August 2022, the company stated support for keeping temperature increase below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and supported the objectives of the Paris Agreement in its 2021 Sustainability Report, published in June 2022. However, its corporate website accessed in August 2022 also appeared to emphasize the threat of energy security and demand in responding to climate change, thereby appearing to support a less urgent approach. In a June 2020 CNN article, Saudi Aramco repeated this stance, highlighting the need to meet the world's growing energy demand, stating climate change solutions must take into account the need to maintain affordable energy supplies. On the need for regulation to respond to climate change, Aramco CEO Amin H. Nasser was a signatory of a joint letter from the OGC Initiative in May 2020 that called for ‘efficient’ policies that accelerate the energy transition without adding clarification on what policies this includes.

Engagement with Climate-Related Regulations: Saudi Aramco appears to have limited transparent engagement with specific items of climate regulation and legislation. The company does not appear to directly disclose its positions towards, or engagement with, any climate-related policy in its corporate reporting.

Positioning on Energy Transition: Saudi Aramco appears to support the continued role of fossil fuels in the future energy mix, particularly fossil gas. In its 2021 Sustainability Report, published in August 2022, the company stated that a smooth energy transition was dependent on energy security, disagreeing with the ‘dominant public narrative’ focused on transitioning away from hydrocarbons, adding that this would risk a stable and efficient energy supply. In the same report, Aramco CEO Nasser stated that ‘chronic underinvestment in oil and gas production’ was of a particular concern, adding that there would still be a need for hydrocarbons beyond 2050 while he was reported by Upstream Online in May 2022 to have advocated for further investments in oil and gas, adding that new sources will be needed and operate for a long time to come.

Saudi Aramco also does also appear to not support the decarbonization of road transport, stating on its corporate website in 2022 that ‘well into the future the vast majority of cars on the road will be powered by internal combustion engines (ICE)’. In 2020, Saudi Aramco wrote a sponsored article in the Financial Times, in which it promoted the climate benefits of ICE engines compared to electric vehicles and called for the technology not to be regulated. It suggested that the CO2 emissions should be regulated instead and that heavy regulation in the EU means that all EV’s will go to western markets, and the rest of the world will keep ICE vehicles.

Industry Association Governance: Saudi Aramco lacks a clearly identifiable disclosure of memberships held with industry associations and has not published an industry association review. Nevertheless, Aramco is a member of the International Oil and Gas Producers (IOGP) and a subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, (Motiva Enterprises) is a member of American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) as well as the American Petroleum Institute (API). These industry associations have historically lobbied negatively on climate-related regulations and the energy transition.

Additional Note: Saudi Aramco is headquartered in Saudi Arabia, where InfluenceMap’s LobbyMap platform can currently only make a provisional assessment of corporate climate policy engagement, due to limited capability to access publicly available data on this issue. As it is possible that InfluenceMap is not yet able to fully capture evidence of Saudi Aramco's climate policy engagement activities, these scores should be considered provisional at this time.

In addition, Saudi Aramco is a listed company with more than 50% of its shares owned by the government of Saudi Arabia. State-owned enterprises likely retain channels of direct and private engagement with government officials that InfluenceMap is unable to assess, and therefore are not represented in Saudi Aramco's engagement intensity metric.

InfluenceMap collects and assesses evidence of corporate climate policy engagement on a weekly basis, depending on the availability of information from each specific data source (for more information, see our methodology). While this analysis flows through to the company’s scores each week, the summary above is updated periodically. This summary was last updated in Q3 2022.