RIYADH: If there’s a better place to do oil business than Houston, Saudi Arabia hasn’t found it yet, the kingdom’s new energy minister told me in a recent interview. In a small conference room in Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Khalid Al-Falih’s soft and precise voice rose a little, and a smile and a chuckle broke through his academic demeanor after he gently interrupted my questions about faraway things like China’s economy, and began talking about the U.S. energy capital.
“Saudi Aramco has been in Houston for as long as I can remember,” he said. A few minutes earlier, the man with the world’s most powerful energy job had reached over the table between us and tapped a button on my phone to check the time. He had, as he probably always does, a busy schedule (and to be fair, he let the interview run later than originally planned).
But you could tell he enjoyed talking about this city, and “the great talent that comes out of this market.” The story you usually hear about Saudi Arabia is how it refused to lower oil production to support prices because its leaders wanted to bankrupt U.S. shale drillers.
