CERAWeek Diary: Across the bridge, a real piece of Saudi tech in Houston fantasy land

HOUSTON: Take a trip across the “skybridge” from the Hilton Americas hotel to the George R. Brown Convention Center in downtown Houston, and you are in a different world. Is it Saudi Arabia? Is it ancient Rome? Is it the depths of the Permian Basin? It’s all very confusing.
The bridge — really just a third-floor walkway with views over the pleasant greenery of central Houston — links the CERAWeek by IHS Markit energy forum with its hip overspill area, the Innovation Agora.
It also contains the Lyceum Workshops interactive program; with all these classical allusions you might expect to find a crowd of toga-clad sybarites reclining in the vomitorium, plucking lyres and demanding their grapes be peeled.
But not many Texans are like that, in my experience. Those here settled instead for chicken satay and peanut sauce canapes.
The first thing that greets you is straight out of Ad Diriyah, near Riyadh — an awesome-looking racing car complete with Saudi Aramco speed flashes and tail-fins you could build a garden patio on. It is a vehicle from the Kingdom’s recent Formula E event, and would turn many heads, even in Houston’s bling-laden Avenida.
Take a stroll around and you will find another example of the Kingdom’s high-tech prowess. Wedged into a corner is another Aramco-badged vehicle — a Ford F-150 pick-up truck, fitted with the company’s revolutionary gasoline compression ignition engine, designed for more efficient and cleaner motoring. One Agoran asked: “How did they get it parked there?”
Close by is the Aramco “partner house,” a corporate space given over to strategic partners of CERAWeek, which the Saudi energy giant has been for years. Bathed in Aramco’s company colors of blue and green, you marvel at wireless sensors the size of golf balls, anti-corrosion technology, jars of Saudi sand used in hydraulic fracturing — better than US sand apparently — and new zeolites, chemical catalysts that help in the oil “cracking” process. These are all examples of the Kingdom’s cutting-edge energy technology.
But the most surreal part of the Agora experience still awaits you, in the partner house occupied by Emerson, the engineering company based in Missouri but increasingly active in Saudi Arabia. There, men in suits and hard hats take you on a simulated journey through the Permian oil production process, from extraction through pipelining to refining and power generation.
Emerson employees bounce around excitedly explaining the joy that the company’s technology and digital data systems have brought to their lives. In a boiler suit and hard hat, Mo tells how she doesn’t have to worry that pipes will get corroded any more because she can monitor them real-time from Emerson consoles; Megan enthusiastically expounds the pleasure she now gets out of managing her fleet of power stations, thanks to the same equipment.
Surely these people are all actors — nobody could be naturally that happy about the dirty work of fracking and shipping shale oil?
But Mike Train, president of Emerson Automation Solutions and certainly no thespian, explains how the company’s technology really is a game-changer in the digital transformation going on in the global energy business.
It is a big thing, too, in Saudi Arabia, where Emerson last year opened a facility in the Dhahran Techno Valley in the Eastern Province, part of the company’s growing operations in the Kingdom.
Train is looking for Saudi employees, women in particular, to beef up Emerson’s business there, and will coach newcomers in the cutting-edge processes the company pioneers. It sounds like a good offer for any young potential Saudi Agorans.
Back across the skybridge, on the escalators of Hilton Americas hotel, the memory of the Innovation Agora instantly assumed the status of fantasy. Had it all been a dream? The peanut sauce stain on my shirt was the only evidence it had been real.