BEIJING: Petroleum and Mineral Resources Minister Ali Al-Naimi said on Friday Saudi Arabia’s overall downstream investment drive would double its refining capacity at home and abroad by 2015.

Kingdom is building two new mega refineries at home with a combined capacity of 800,000 barrels per day, Al-Naimi said in a speech at Peking University.

These are part of a $100 billion investment plan involving maintaining and boosting oil and gas production capacity and adding refining facilities in and out of Saudi Arabia, the oil minister said.

“Having achieved our crude oil production capacity increase to 12.5 million bpd in June 2009, we are expanding our gas production and processing capacity to 4.5 billion cubic feet by 2014, a 40 percent increase over the current capacity,” Al-Naimi said.

Saudi Arabia’s demand for gas has been surging to feed its power and industrial sectors in an economic boom fueled by an oil price rally between 2002 and 2008.

Al-Naimi said the growth in Saudi gas output would meet the needs of local electricity generation, desalination plants, petrochemicals and other industries.

He noted that the world’s economies are now more energy- and oil-efficient than at any time in history.

The world consumes 20 percent less energy per $1,000 of GDP than it did back in 1990, Al-Naimi said.

China’s energy consumption in constant prices is down from 2.6 barrels of oil equivalent for each $1,000 of GDP in 1990 to 1.3 currently, he added.

Contrary to the scenario of depleting energy resources painted by pessimists, Al-Naimi said that global proven oil resources now stand at 1.3 trillion barrel, up from 1 trillion barrels in 1990 despite 485 billion barrels having been extracted and consumed over the period.

Similarly, gas reserves have risen by 50 percent since 1990, he said.

“The fact of the matter is that technology and human ingenuity have contributed to the growth in global hydrocarbon resources,” the Saudi oil minister added.

Before visiting Beijing, the oil minister toured the 240,000-bpd Fujian refinery in southeastern Fujian province in which Saudi Aramco has a 25 percent stake in partnership with Sinopec Corp. and Exxon Mobil. Aramco is now in revived discussions with Sinopec to invest in a second Chinese refinery in the eastern port city of Qingdao, company executives have said.

Saudi Arabia is China’s No.1 crude supplier, making up 20 percent of total imports into the world’s second-largest oil consumer.

Meanwhile, a senior Saudi Aramco official said on Friday that the company saw signs of oil demand recovery led by China, although overall demand was still lower than last year.

“There are signs of recovery in oil demand in developing and emerging economies led by the Chinese economy,” Saudi Aramco Chief Executive Khalid Al-Falih told Xinhua here.

To meet growing Chinese demand, Aramco decided to greatly increase its crude oil exports to China.

Aramco planned to supply China with one million barrels per day of crude, Al-Falih said on Tuesday in Fujian.

The one million bpd figure would be nearly 30 percent more than actual exports from the Kingdom seen in the first nine months of this year as recorded by Chinese customs. Chinese state oil company Sinopec said the supply would begin next year.

The official did not give Xinhua a direct answer about the progress of a plan to launch another joint venture refinery in Qingdao.

“For any project we build, there is a period to create enough profit. Then we can consider further expansion and investment,” he said, according to Xinhua.

But Al-Falih said he now felt “very satisfied” about China’s new oil pricing mechanism, which was put in place at the beginning of 2009.