Saudi Arabia correspondent — OPEC+ and oil markets, Vision 2030, and Gulf finance. Signed columns, each an argument; the views are the correspondent’s own.
Opinion — the views in these columns are the correspondent’s own.
OPEC+ and oil markets, Vision 2030, and Gulf finance.
Career
Khalid Al-Harbi has spent his career in the rooms where the price of oil is decided — and in the newsrooms that explain those decisions to everyone else. An economics graduate of King Saud University with a master's in energy economics from the University of Aberdeen, he edited the business pages of the Gulf business press in Riyadh for eight years before moving to Dubai, where the region's oil money gets managed, hedged, and spent.
It was in Dubai that he became an energy columnist in his own right, writing the weekly brief that traders in three time zones read before the futures open. A year in Houston — his deliberate choice, to study the shale producers who rewrote OPEC's rulebook — completed the circle: he is one of the few columnists who has stood on a Gulf production platform and in a Texas boardroom in the same quarter and can tell you what each side gets wrong about the other.
What shaped his lens: watching the 2020 price war from inside the region that started it. He wrote then that the crash would not destroy OPEC but discipline it — and that discipline, he argues, is the real story of OPEC+ today. His defining episode: the marathon 2023 production-cut talks, when he filed from the corridors between sessions while official statements said nothing and his sources said everything.
Based in Riyadh, he covers OPEC+ and oil markets, Vision 2030, and Gulf finance.
Personal
Khalid Al-Harbi was born into a Riyadh merchant family that has traded textiles for three generations, and grew up in old Riyadh, when the city still smelled of cardamom from the corner roaster. He is married, with three sons, and the family lives in the Al Yasmin district of Riyadh. In the evenings, after the markets close, he plays the oud — badly, he insists, but regularly. The household runs on cardamom coffee, brewed dark and taken seriously. Arabic and English are both spoken at home; his sons tease that their father's two languages correspond to his two moods — the Gulf trader and the economist.
Timeline
2004 — Economics degree, King Saud University; master's in energy economics, University of Aberdeen
2005–2012 — Business editor, Gulf business press, Riyadh
2013–2019 — Energy columnist, Dubai
2020 — Reporting year on US shale, Houston
2021–2025 — Senior energy columnist, Riyadh
2026 — Correspondent for OPEC+ and Gulf finance, Magna Bureau
OpinionGulf sovereign wealth
Diplomacy With a Balance Sheet
By Khalid Al-Harbi · Saudi Arabia correspondent · Riyadh, September 28, 2026
In the desert, we have a saying: the man who pays in cash is never refused at the door. These days, the doors of the world seem to be opening rather often — in London boardrooms, in Silicon Valley, in the ports of East Africa. The Gulf has discovered that money, deployed with patience, is a foreign policy. And a very quiet one.
Consider the numbers, because the numbers are the argument. The Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia now manages assets approaching a trillion dollars — a fund that barely existed a decade ago. Abu Dhabi's ADIA is estimated at north of a trillion. Add Qatar, Kuwait, and the rest, and the Gulf's sovereign funds command well over four trillion dollars — more than the annual economic output of most countries on earth. A generation ago, this money bought two things: weapons and American Treasury bonds. Today it buys the future itself: ports, mines, football clubs, gaming studios, data centers for artificial intelligence, stakes in the great technology companies of the age.
The mechanism is the message. Where the old lenders arrived with conditions — structural adjustments, governance benchmarks, a 200-page annex of homework — the Gulf arrives with a term sheet and a thirty-year horizon. Equity, not debt. Partnership, not programs. Nobody in Riyadh is going to lecture you about your parliament before the check clears, and nobody in Abu Dhabi is going to hold a hearing about your human rights record back home. This is not generosity; let us be precise. It is strategy. But it is a strategy that comes without the sermon, and in much of the world, the sermon was always the insult added to the injury. As we say at home: patience is the key to relief.
The portfolio, you see, is the foreign policy. Each stake is a small embassy: a board seat here, a joint venture there, a stadium with your club's name on it, a port where your ships dock first. No white papers, no doctrine speeches, no Monroe Doctrine with a Gulf accent — just signatures. Influence, like good perfume, is best worn lightly. The great powers of the past built spheres of influence with gunboats and garrisons; the Gulf builds them with cap tables. It is cheaper, it is quieter, and — this is the part the old powers find most disconcerting — it works.
“We do not announce doctrines. We sign term sheets. The difference is approximately thirty years.”
Watch how the world receives it, because the reception tells you everything. The West frets — sportswashing! influence-buying! the capture of the beautiful game! — and then, politely, takes the money: the pension funds need the returns, the startups need the capital, the football clubs need the transfers. The East partners eagerly — Chinese technology, Indian infrastructure, Southeast Asian ports — capital without sermons, which suits everyone involved. And the Global South welcomes it, because here at last is a lender who arrives without a lecture. Across Africa and Asia, Gulf capital is building ports, buying agricultural stakes, funding refineries — the unglamorous infrastructure of somebody else's future. The barrels made the money; the money is now making the relationships.
And now the newest frontier: intelligence itself. The Gulf is pouring capital into artificial intelligence — data centers in the desert, where land is cheap and the sun provides the power; stakes in the chipmakers and the model-builders; national AI champions created from scratch. It is the same playbook applied to the century's scarcest resource: buy early, hold long, partner with everyone, lecture no one. The West debates whether to sell the chips; the East debates whether to share the models; the Gulf simply writes the check for the power plants that will run them all. In the race for the future, the desert has excellent seats — because it bought the stadium.
There is, naturally, an older game being played underneath. Spare capacity in oil taught the Gulf that leverage unused is leverage wasted — and sovereign capital is spare capacity in financial form, held off the market of influence until the moment is right. When a Western capital needs investment and its own treasuries are empty, the phone rings in Riyadh. When a technology company needs a hundred billion for its next data center, the term sheet comes from the desert. Nobody is coerced. Nobody is threatened. The door simply opens — for those who understand that in the twenty-first century, the most powerful sentence in diplomacy is not a threat. It is: we can fund that.
And yet — because honesty is also a strategy — money is not wisdom. Funds can overpay; everyone in this business remembers a deal or two that looked better on the yacht than on the balance sheet. The great domestic wagers — the giga-projects, the post-oil diversification — must actually produce jobs and industries, not just headlines and renderings. And reputation, that most delicate of assets, is earned over decades and can be spent in an afternoon. We know this. The checkbook opens the door; it does not guarantee you are welcome to stay. Influence bought in a hurry is rented, not owned.
“The old empires built spheres of influence with gunboats. We build them with cap tables — cheaper, quieter, and considerably less likely to sink.”
So watch the quiet money. While the old powers argue about the rules of the order, the Gulf is buying squares on the board — patiently, courteously, and at a scale that would make the merchant princes of Venice weep with envy. The palm tree grows slowly, as our grandfathers said, but its shade lasts. In a world of four-year election cycles, a thirty-year horizon is not just a strategy. It is a superpower.
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OpinionOPEC+ & oil markets
OPEC+ Is Not a Cartel. It's a Thermostat.
By Khalid Al-Harbi · Saudi Arabia correspondent · Riyadh, September 27, 2026
In the desert, the man who shouts about water usually has none to sell. Bear this in mind when you read the annual obituaries of oil.
They arrive like clockwork — a London think tank, a glossy report: demand has peaked, the transition is accelerating. And oil attends its own funeral, sends flowers, and returns to work. The obituaries are always written from the cities where the transition is furthest along, about a world that mostly lives elsewhere. Western demand did peak; congratulations to all involved. But the barrels that matter now are in Asia and Africa, where rising incomes still mean first cars, first air conditioners, first flights. The transition is real. It is also, for now, an addition to the energy system — not yet a substitution of it.
We have seen the alternative to management, and it was not pretty. In April 2020 the market briefly priced oil below zero — producers paying buyers to take the barrels away, tankers full of crude with nowhere to dock, the screen flashing numbers the textbooks said were impossible. The pre-2016 free-for-all gave us $140 oil followed by $30 oil: booms that broke budgets, busts that broke companies. The thermostat was invented because the alternative was a sauna followed by an ice bath — and nobody, not the producer, not the consumer, not the airline, not the farmer, thrives on thermal shock. Spare capacity, held patiently off the market, is the shock absorber. It is the most boring and most valuable commodity in the building.
This is where patience becomes strategy. OPEC+ is routinely called a cartel, the way a blunt instrument is routinely used — often, and without precision. A cartel fixes prices. What OPEC+ manages is spare capacity: the market's shock absorber. When prices run too hot, barrels return; when the market drowns, barrels are withheld. A thermostat, not a cartel. The alternative — the pre-2016 free-for-all — gave us $140 oil followed by $30 oil, which pleased no one except, briefly, the speculators. As we say at home: patience is the key to relief.
The thermostat has a setting, and the setting is arithmetic, not malice. Too high, and every Western capital rediscovers its enthusiasm for alternatives with the zeal of the converted — no producer wishes to fund its own replacement. Too low, and treasuries from Riyadh to Moscow to Abuja cannot balance their books, let alone finance the diversification — the giga-projects, the post-oil wager — that the transition’s cheerleaders claim to want. So the price is kept in the corridor where the transition is neither strangled nor stampeded. Our critics call this manipulation. We call it, politely, market stability. The difference between the two words is approximately the difference between being inside the alliance and outside it.
“A cartel fixes prices. We manage the weather.”
Is this power used strategically? Naturally. Spare capacity is leverage, and leverage unused is leverage wasted — a lesson the Gulf learned decades ago and has not misplaced. But the caricature of producers gleefully immiserating consumers misses the actual arithmetic: no producer wants prices so high they accelerate the transition, nor so low they break their own treasury. The thermostat has a comfort zone. Everyone — consumer and producer alike — quietly benefits from it.
Meanwhile the East is not theorizing about demand; it is consuming it. India is now the largest source of oil demand growth on the planet — more than a billion people climbing the income ladder, buying their first scooters, their first cars, their first flights. China’s great teapot refineries and its strategic reserves buy with a patience that would impress a chess master. Asia-Pacific now accounts for well over a third of global oil consumption, and the share rises every year. The barrels followed the customers, as barrels do. The market did not die. It simply moved to where the future is being built — and the future, it turns out, is being built in the East and the South.
And we are unmoved — gently, courteously unmoved — by the sermons. They are delivered from capitals whose lights have never flickered, to audiences being asked to forgo the air conditioner, the motorbike, the flight that the sermon-givers take for granted. More than half a billion people still live without electricity; across much of Africa, the energy transition is not a choice between technologies but a choice between energy and none. We wish our Western friends every success with their transition. We will even sell them the barrels they still need while they build it. But the condescension — the suggestion that the South should leapfrog into a future the North took two centuries to reach, and do it without the cheap energy that built the North — is noted, filed, and priced in.
“The market did not die. It relocated — and the obituary writers were not invited to the new address.”
And we will be polite about the sermons. The green homilies from Western capitals are delivered from cities whose lights have never flickered; the assurances from the East should be weighed, not worshipped. We wish all our friends well — and we continue to sell, steadily, to the half of humanity still climbing toward the light switch. The barrel has moved house: from Western headlines to Asian demand, African cities, and an alliance of producers that spans the old divides. The market did not die. It relocated. The obituary writers were not invited to the new address.
