Saudi Aramco appoints new CEO for Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures

Saudi Aramco has appointed Mahdi Aladel, who previously headed Aramco’s base oils and lubricants division, as chief executive officer (CEO) of Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures (SAEV), succeeding Majid Mufti.

Saudi Aramco Energy Ventures, which aims to start a USD500 million fund, is the corporate venture subsidiary of Saudi Aramco, the world’s leading integrated energy and chemicals company. Its mission is: “to invest globally into early-stage and high growth companies with technologies of strategic importance to Aramco, to accelerate their development and their deployment in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.”

SAEV invests in upstream and downstream oil and gas, petrochemicals, renewables, energy efficiency and water sectors. Its objective is to deploy technologies that enhance the  identification and management of reserves, enhance primary energy production, improve operational efficiency, increase value capture in downstream processing, and support optimization of Kingdom energy and water consumption.

Since 2012, the company has backed 45 technology companies, primarily in the U.S. and Europe, Mufti said in January 2020.

“The program has been running since 2012, we started making our investments in 2013, and over the past seven years we have managed to deploy a fair bit of capital into investments across 40 different opportunities,” Mufti said in an interview early this year.