As Alarm Over Plastic Grows, Saudis Ramp up Production in the US
July 14, 2022 | Grist
The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry, and burned tires.
Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, or GCGV, a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames, and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.
The plant is the first joint venture in the Americas between Saudi Basic Industries Corp., or SABIC, a chemical manufacturing giant tied to one of the world’s richest royal families, and Exxon Mobil, America’s biggest energy company. Exxon Mobil built its wealth on drilling for and refining oil, SABIC by making petrochemicals. As climate concerns lead to a slow but steady decline in the demand for oil, the companies’ collaboration represents a shift by the fossil fuel industry. Rather than transforming the fossilized remains of organisms into gasoline and other motor fuels, the Texas plant breaks apart the molecular structure of oil, through a process called cracking, which turns it into the primary ingredient for car seats, single-use plastic bags, plastic coffee cups, and much more.
“It became apparent to me that the fossil-fuel industry is moving toward plastic because they’re losing market share in transportation and energy generation,” said Judith Enck, a former regional administrator with the United States Environmental Protection Agency who now leads the advocacy group Beyond Plastics and teaches at Bennington College.
One primary player in this shift is the House of Saud, the royal family that has ruled since 1902 and named Saudi Arabia in 1932. The family has moved to diversify its economy and the products that come from its vast reserves of oil. The costs and consequences of this diversification ripple far beyond Riyadh, to Texas’ San Patricio County and communities abutting other SABIC facilities in the U.S.
SABIC is a $40 billion company that manufactures chemicals, fertilizers, and plastics and is owned by Aramco, the world’s largest oil company. In May, Aramco became the world’s most valuable company — generating tens of billions of dollars in profits yearly to the Saudi royal family and its kingdom.
How the Saudi royals leveraged their way into American plastic is an indicator of the blurring between state and family that has long characterized the kingdom.
