Pariah or Partner?

THE MOST POPULAR ATTRACTION at the Ahmad Al-Jaber Oil & Gas Exhibition in Ahmadi, Kuwait, is a huge empty plexiglass cylinder.

The exhibition celebrates the highly uncelebrated (these days) petroleum industry, containing large interactive displays that explain everything from how fossil fuels are made to how to extract, refine, and transport them. It touts the many ways hydrocarbons are used in modern society, not just powering cars and electrical plants, but as an ingredient in clothing, detergents, beauty products, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals. (Petrochemicals are found in aspirin, penicillin, cough syrup, and the COVID-19 vaccine, among other things.) Several rooms celebrate the history of Kuwait’s oil industry dating back to the drilling of the first well in 1938, which transformed the country from a British protectorate best known for pearl diving into a founding member of OPEC. 

All this leads to the final gallery, called “Our Future,” where the plexiglass tank sits, 11 feet tall and 5 feet in diameter, facing a pyramid of more than a hundred oil drums stacked against the opposite wall. One side of the tank bears a simple message in Arabic and English: 

Every second of every day, Kuwait produces this much oil. 

As the curious gather, a hole in the ceiling opens and a deluge of brown crude-like liquid pours down with a roar. (They don’t use real crude, which is slightly radioactive, believe it or not.) It fills the tank in an instant, sloshing up the sides and roiling back over itself like a pint of Guinness or, if your imagination tends that way, a mushroom cloud. Videos of the demonstration have gotten tens of thousands of likes on TikTok and YouTube.

So, how much oil is that? Here is the answer: Kuwait produces about 35 barrels — or nearly 1,500 gallons — of oil. 

Every second. 

Of every day.

Climate activists may recoil from such information, but Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah ’94, CEO of the Kuwait Petroleum Corp. (KPC), which owns all that oil, regards it with pride. Indeed, he is trying to get the number even higher, boosting Kuwait’s oil production as well as tapping into its natural gas reserves. Earlier this year, KPC’s massive Al-Zour refinery, the seventh largest in the world, became fully operational. Built by a Chinese construction firm at a cost of $27 billion, Al-Zour has the capacity to refine 615,000 barrels of oil a day, producing gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, kerosene, and fuel oil, as well as 30 billion cubic meters of liquified natural gas per day.

Heading an oil company seems like an unlikely place for al-Sabah to have landed, considering that he lacks formal training in engineering, geology, or even finance. A lawyer who spent much of his career in private practice and KPC’s legal department, he once imagined himself continuing the family tradition of becoming a diplomat. Still, he brings an unusually broad range of experience to the job. He is deeply rooted in his country’s culture, yet able to straddle cultures with ease.

A member of Kuwait’s ruling family, al-Sabah lived in the United Kingdom and the United States more or less continuously from the ages of 4 to 34. He speaks English without a trace of an accent. At home, he wears the traditional Arab robe (called a dishdasha) and headdress (a keffiyeh or ghutra crowned with an agal) but on business travel favors tailored suits. His two sons, Nasir ’25 and Abdulaziz ’28, are currently Princeton undergraduates.

Nawaf al-Sabah ’94, center, in the Oval Office with his father, right, and President George H.W. Bush at a press conference following the liberation of Kuwait in Operation Desert Storm.

Courtesy of Nawaf al-Sabah ’94

During the Gulf War from 1990 to ’91, al-Sabah’s father was Kuwait’s ambassador to the U.S. and relied on his middle son, then about to start his sophomore year, to help assemble congressional support for U.S. military involvement. At an age when many of his classmates were attending bicker sessions on Prospect Avenue,  al-Sabah joined his father at a meeting in the Oval Office. 

As head of the state-owned oil company, al-Sabah occupies an outsized role in Kuwait’s economy. According to the International Trade Administration, oil accounts for 95% of Kuwait’s exports and 90% of government export revenues. Those exports helped KPC record $140 billion in total revenue in 2022-23, and $8.9 billion in profits, according to its 2022-23 annual report. The company’s gleaming headquarters, on the waterfront just outside downtown Kuwait City, are attached to the state oil ministry. The oil minister, ostensibly al-Sabah’s boss, has his office on the 14th floor; al-Sabah sits on the 19th floor. Students of organizational dynamics can draw their own conclusions about where power really lies.

“Al-Sabah has emerged as one of the leaders in the energy industry and increasingly in the global economy,” says Daniel Yergin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations, as well as three other books about the oil industry.

The demand for oil is changing, al-Sabah acknowledges, and climate change is real. Nevertheless, he believes that KPC can produce more hydrocarbons while also lowering its emissions of carbon dioxide. Indeed, it will have to. “Any way you look at the energy transition, the end product is that there will still be a role for oil,” he insists. “The question is: Whose oil? And we intend to raise our hands and say it will be ours.” 

KPC is spending upward of $110 billion to reduce emissions. It is all part of the company’s goal of reaching net-zero by 2050. If that seems like an unacceptably distant target, al-Sabah notes slyly that it is only four years later than the date Princeton University has set for itself. 

“If you can solve the emissions problem,” he contends, “you can solve the climate problem without cutting back on energy that the world needs.” 

A whole world of controversy lies within that “if.” To critics, such proposals are merely greenwashing as long as oil companies continue to produce fossil fuels for the world to burn. “We know we need to do a fossil fuel phase-out if we are to have any chance of meeting the [global warming] target set in [the] Paris [Agreement],” says Daphne Wysham ’83 of the nonprofit Methane Action.

Al-Sabah counters that we will continue to need petroleum-based products for decades to come, both to sustain our own standard of living and to raise it in the developing world. Global demand for energy will continue to rise, and no combination of renewables currently on the board can fully meet it. 

Given this, al-Sabah thinks we should encourage oil companies to reduce their emissions and help them do even more, treating them more like partners in the effort to address climate change rather than pariahs. Usually soft-spoken and urbane, he can be blunt when he needs to be. Ending fossil fuel production without an abundant, reliable energy alternative, he says, is like “calling for humanity to jump out of a plane and then try to invent a parachute on the way down.”  

KUWAIT IS A SMALL COUNTRY, geographically about the size of New Jersey. It has a population of 4.45 million people, only a third of whom are Kuwaiti citizens; the rest are foreign nationals and guest workers. The country sits atop approximately 7% of the planet’s oil reserves. When it comes to exports, all Kuwait really has is oil; less than 1% of the land is considered arable. Still, Kuwait City was home to more billionaires per capita than anywhere else, according to a 2022 survey by the consulting firm Wealth-X. 

Islam is the state religion, but Kuwaitis enjoy greater political and religious freedom than elsewhere in the region. Women often dress in Western clothes, though conservatively. Less austere than the Saudis, less freewheeling than the Emiratis, Kuwaitis pride themselves on being family friendly and, in a good way, a little boring. For this reason, U.S. State Department officials sometimes refer to Kuwait as the Midwest of the Middle East. 

Still, Kuwait is situated in a rough neighborhood, sharing a land border with Iraq and a maritime border with Iran. (Sensitive to Iranian hegemony, Kuwaitis pointedly call the body of water separating them the Arabian Gulf, not the Persian Gulf.) It has been a strong American ally, particularly since the Gulf War. Saddam Hussein’s invasion remains etched in the memories of all Kuwaitis over the age of 40, in al-Sabah’s perhaps more than many. 

Kuwait is a constitutional hereditary monarchy, which the al-Sabah family has ruled since 1752. Their right to do so is now enshrined in the constitution. Family members, of which there are approximately 1,200, occupy the leading political and governmental posts. The current emir is al-Sabah’s great uncle. 

The third of five children, al-Sabah and his family moved to London in 1975 when his father, Saud Nasser al-Sabah, a UK-trained barrister, was appointed ambassador to the Court of St. James. Five years later, when he was named ambassador to the United States, the family relocated to Washington, D.C. (As an illustration of how tight the Kuwaiti ruling circle is, al-Sabah’s wife is the daughter of his father’s successor as ambassador to the U.S.) Al-Sabah went to high school at the prestigious, all-boys St. Albans School.

Growing up, al-Sabah says, he was a political nerd who, even as a teenager, liked to tag along to think tank briefings and watch the Sunday morning talk shows — “not the most exciting stuff now that I think about it in hindsight,” he laughs. He entered Princeton with the Class of 1993, intending to study international relations. That wish came true sooner than anticipated, and in a most undesired way.

On July 17, 1990, al-Sabah was riding to New York with several family members and embassy staff for a vacation flight home when his father received a telegram warning that Iraqi troops were massing on the Kuwaiti border. The rest of the family boarded their flight, but al-Sabah returned with his father to Washington. Early in the morning of Aug. 2, his father received a call confirming the Iraqi invasion. 

With the embassy short-staffed, Ambassador al-Sabah directed his son to handle his incoming calls, but first to contact his mother back home. After some difficulty, he persuaded her that she was a target for Saddam’s army and to flee with his younger sister to safety. (Moving through safe houses, they eventually crossed the border into Saudi Arabia.) The following day, al-Sabah sat in as his father translated a call between President George H.W. Bush and the Kuwaiti emir in which Bush pledged to repel the invaders.

When it became clear that the Bush administration would seek congressional approval for the use of U.S. military force, Ambassador al-Sabah asked his son to serve, in essence, as his private secretary, helping him line up support on Capitol Hill. 

Says Sheikh Nawaf al-Sabah ’94: “We find that in some research institutions we go to, the answer is, ‘Oh no, I can’t touch that, it has something to do with hydrocarbons.’ I think that doesn’t help the discussion moving forward.” 

Photo: Christopher Pike

“He said, ‘Look, I can’t do this without you,’” al-Sabah recalls. “And I couldn’t contemplate sitting in classes while all this was happening.” The University agreed to let al-Sabah take a gap year.

Over the coming months, al-Sabah joined his father in numerous meetings with members of Congress, exhibiting a level of confidence that sometimes bordered on cheekiness. When then-Sen. Al Gore, a fellow St. Albans alum, expressed skepticism about U.S. military intervention, the 19-year-old al-Sabah reminded him of the school prayer, which includes the line, “Help me to stand for the hard right against the easy wrong.” Gore apparently did not take offense and at a later meeting asked Ambassador al-Sabah, “Where’s my St. Albans buddy?”

On Jan. 12, 1991, Congress voted narrowly to authorize the use of American force. Four days later, after a U.N. deadline for Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait had passed, al-Sabah was at the embassy when his father returned, stone faced, from a meeting with Secretary of State James Baker ’52. He instructed his son to place a secure call to the emir. 

“I was used to placing these calls on a daily basis, but that day my fingers couldn’t touch the keys,” al-Sabah recalls. “I tried a few times, put the receiver down, and said, ‘You have to tell me what was said.’” Baker had told the ambassador that, by law, Kuwait needed to make a formal request for U.S. military intervention. Al-Sabah placed the call for his father, but was then forbidden to leave the room. He and his father spent the next few hours drafting press releases with the TV on until CNN announced that the war had begun. Only then did they open the door and inform the embassy staff.

Forty-two days later, on Feb. 28, 1991, Operation Desert Storm ended with a complete victory for American and coalition forces. The following morning, President Bush invited the ambassador to the White House to extend his congratulations. Al-Sabah, who was preparing remarks for his father to deliver at a press conference, was told to finish them in the car. When they arrived at the West Wing, chief of staff John Sununu and presidential assistant Richard Haass came to escort Ambassador al-Sabah into the Oval Office. 

“By the way,” the ambassador told them, according to al-Sabah, “my son is coming with me.” Hurriedly adjusting his tie, al-Sabah walked in beside Haass, who whispered, “We don’t normally allow this. But it’s not every day we win a war.”

Nervous as he was, al-Sabah did not show it. Rather, in another display of aplomb, upon being introduced to Bush he told him that friends back home had made him promise to extend a traditional Kuwaiti sign of respect for an elder — whereupon he kissed the American president on the forehead. When the press entered, Bush remarked that Kuwaitis would again be able to chart their own destinies. Looking over at al-Sabah, he added that he was happy the young man was there to represent the next generation of Kuwaiti-American friendship. 

“As you can imagine,” al-Sabah says, “I got a lot of ribbing over that back at Princeton.”

THE FOLLOWING FALL, al-Sabah reentered Princeton in the Class of 1994. He joined Ivy Club, where he was known affectionately as “Waffer.” Because he was an observant Muslim, the club even installed a soda tap in the bar next to the beer taps. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody navigate two cultures as well as he did,” says Eric Robertsen ’95. “He never cut corners. He made sacrifices, and people respected him for it.” 

“I didn’t even know he was a member of the royal family of Kuwait or even where he was from at first,” adds Harry LeFrak ’94, a former roommate. 

As he had long planned, al-Sabah joined the School of Public and International Affairs (SPIA) and wrote his thesis on Kuwaiti national security policy and the Gulf War. Taking advantage of his father’s connections, al-Sabah was able to join Bush and other administration figures when they flew to Kuwait on the emir’s jet to celebrate the liberation. During the long flights, al-Sabah interviewed the then-former president along with Baker and Sununu, and later got comments from Haass on his first draft. (“I really took my thesis seriously,” he says.) Al-Sabah’s opening footnote humble-brags, “George Bush, President of the United States, 1989-1993, interview with author, April 13, 1993.” He laughs that he deliberately structured the introduction just so he could cite that first.

Al-Sabah went on to Harvard Law School, in the process becoming the first Kuwaiti citizen ever to earn an American J.D. degree. In 1997, he joined the law firm Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, doing corporate transactions in their Century City, California, office. After three years of American training he decided, “Well, it’s about time to go back home.”

But not quite. Joining KPC as a junior legal counsel, al-Sabah was asked to head the company’s Washington office from 2002 to ’04, coinciding with the start of the Iraq War, to ensure, in his words, “that our big customer [the U.S. military] was getting what they needed.” Returning to Kuwait for good, he served as KPC’s general counsel from 2005 to ’13. For the next nine years, he headed KPC’s foreign exploration subsidiary as well as a second subsidiary that operates 4,700 service stations across Europe. 

Al-Sabah was named KPC’s chief executive officer by the Kuwaiti cabinet on March 16, 2022. 

SINCE TAKING OVER AS CEO, al-Sabah has announced goals to increase KPC’s oil production to 4.75 million barrels a day by 2040 and its natural gas production to 4 billion cubic feet a day by 2030. KPC has begun to develop the Durra gas field, which it shares with Saudi Arabia, containing an estimated 20 trillion cubic feet of reserves. 

When al-Sabah boasts that Kuwait produces “the lowest cost carbon barrel” in the world, he is referencing a happy fact of geology. Kuwait’s Burgan oil field has a high natural underground pressure, which means that oil can be extracted there without using energy-intensive equipment that is required in other parts of the world. Further, the country’s natural gradient enables pipelines to carry oil largely downhill to refineries and ports.

Starting from that base, KPC intends to reach net-zero by reducing what are known as Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions — essentially, emissions associated with producing petroleum — by using solar-powered well pumps or recycling the gas that seeps out of an oil well rather than burning it off. 

As its oil fields age and pressure starts to drop, KPC hopes to rely on carbon capture and underground storage (CCUS) to keep the wells producing. CCUS would take CO2 emitted at Kuwaiti refineries and pipe it underground to maintain well pressure. Drillers in Texas have used CCUS since the 1970s, and the Biden administration promoted CCUS in the Inflation Reduction Act by expanding the tax credit oil companies receive for employing it. 

Beyond this, KPC has branched into a number of other low-emission projects, such as creating hydrogen using renewable energy sources and acquiring a half-interest in an Italian firm that produces biodiesel. The Clean Fuels Project, completed before al-Sabah’s tenure, enables KPC refineries to produce petroleum products that meet tight European emissions standards. KPC is also investing in natural mitigation initiatives, such as planting hundreds of acres of mangrove trees, which suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.

Some of these undertakings are laudable, climate activists acknowledge, but only up to a very limited point. For the most part, they say, it is just window dressing. The heart of KPC’s business will continue to be the extraction of petroleum — at a rate of 1,500 gallons per second — which, when burned, will release CO2 into the atmosphere and drive climate change. Unless that stops, the climate problem will only get worse.

“Trying to reduce the carbon impact of producing a barrel of oil is misguided, and greenwashing at worst,” Rohit Gawande ’11, a venture capitalist specializing in renewable energy, writes in an email. “The carbon emissions of burning a barrel of oil are a magnitude higher than any savings they can make by reducing the emissions from their process of production.”

Activists are not the only critics of efforts by the oil industry to green itself. Last year, U.N. Secretary General António Guterres blasted CCUS for enabling companies “to become more efficient planet wreckers.”

“The problem is not simply fossil fuel emissions,” Guterres said. “It is fossil fuels, period.” 

To which al-Sabah replies: What is your alternative? 

He envisions an oil-less future filled with unemployment, disease, food and energy shortages, and political instability. In fact, for every dystopian story activists paint about a world in which oil production continues unabated, al-Sabah counters with one if it abruptly ends. Even in the most optimistic scenarios, he insists, renewable sources will not be sufficient to meet our energy demands. If wishes were wind farms, so to speak, beggars would ride.

Yergin also believes that hydrocarbons will have to remain an integral part of the global energy mix for the foreseeable future. “The notion that you can transform the energy basis of a $109 trillion world economy overnight is something that just isn’t going to happen,” he says. “There can be declarations and promises, but to address climate you have to move on all fronts, especially technology, and deal with the world as it is.”

One front al-Sabah would like to see the industry move on is partnering with universities to develop technologies that help oil companies lower their greenhouse emissions. So far, though, they have mostly been unreceptive.   

“We find that in some research institutions we go to, the answer is, ‘Oh no, we can’t touch that, it has something to do with hydrocarbons,’” al-Sabah says. “I think that doesn’t help the discussion moving forward.”

KPC has not worked with Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI), a research alliance between the High Meadows Environmental Institute and BP. (Ford Motor Co. and its president, William Ford ’79, were also early supporters.) But it is unclear whether such a relationship would be welcomed. The group Divest Princeton has denounced CMI’s tie to BP as “a toxic relationship that has to end,” and the University has not yet publicly said whether it will renew the partnership when it expires next year. (In September 2023, the Board of Trustees also voted to divest the endowment from all publicly traded fossil fuel companies and disassociate from 90 companies active in thermal-coal or tar-sand segments of the hydrocarbon industry.)

Emeritus professor Robert Socolow, the CMI’s former co-director, believes that partnering with the oil industry can benefit both parties. “This problem of climate change is so challenging that progress requires all sectors of society to cooperate,” he says. “This is not a time for litmus tests.”

Al-Sabah touts KPC’s efforts to reduce its emissions at the slightest invitation, speaking at forums around the world. He has remained particularly close to Princeton, giving a G.S. Beckwith Gilbert ’63 lecture in 2017 and speaking about energy and geopolitics at two Reunions panels last May. Bernard Haykel, a professor of Near Eastern studies who has twice invited al-Sabah to address his class on oil, energy, and the Middle East, says, “I’ve always thought he’s an incredibly thoughtful, open-minded person who is willing to engage honestly with very difficult questions.”

For his part, al-Sabah says he enjoys meeting students. Interactions with them, while “challenging,” are “always true to Princeton’s spirit of having a respectful conversation.” He may yet come to regret this, but al-Sabah tells classes he visits that his personal email can be found on TigerNet and says this has led to some productive exchanges. 

Can an oil company really go green? As charged as that topic is, it is a debate al-Sabah seems eager to have, and one he remains confident he can win.

“As long as I’m honest with people about what we’re doing and have the story to back up what I’m saying — that we are making these investments, that we do need to have a strict decarbonization program, that we’re all trying to reach the same goal — it works.” 

Mark F. Bernstein ’83 is PAW’s senior writer.