Opening remarks by Wail A. Al. Jaafari at the Middle East Corrosion Conference 2025

Your Excellencies, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen,

السلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته, 

and good morning.

It is my great honor to welcome you to the 19^th Middle East Corrosion Conference. 

Since the inception of this conference in 1979, it has distinguished itself as one of the world’s most important platforms for advancing the science and technology needed to fight corrosion.

Over the decades, industry leaders, researchers, and innovators have come together to share knowledge, exchange ideas, and shape the future of asset integrity, advanced materials and corrosion control.

It has become a cornerstone for collaboration across the energy and petrochemical sectors and a crucial part of our mission to enhance the reliability, safety, and sustainability of our assets.

This year’s conference for the first time is being held here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and it stands as the largest gathering in its history.

We are joined by more attendees than ever before.

We welcome more exhibitors than ever before.

And we are hosting more workshops than ever before.

This scale is a reflection of both our collective ambition and the urgency of the challenges we face.

Your presence here today demonstrates the strength of our global community to confront these challenges together.

At Aramco, we have long recognized that corrosion is not merely a technical challenge, but a strategic priority that directly affects operational reliability, safety, and the long-term performance of our critical infrastructure. 

Corrosion has a multi-trillion-dollar global impact, influencing the integrity, efficiency, and sustainability of energy systems worldwide.

In the past three years alone, Aramco has invested more than $70 million in corrosion management technologies, achieving over $770 million in cost savings and avoidance.

At the same time, we have expanded the use of advanced materials, installing approximately 19,000 kilometers of nonmetallic piping. 

And we have launched a joint venture investment in NOVEL to localize manufacturing and expand the application of advanced materials across our operations.

These initiatives underscore Aramco’s leadership in advanced materials and corrosion mitigation, reducing degradation, extending asset life, and enhancing sustainability performance.

Over the past five years, our efforts to innovate have yielded more than 400 granted patents in corrosion, materials, and asset integrity.

Building on this foundation, we are now investing heavily in advanced industrial Artificial Intelligence, marking the next leap forward in our journey toward predictive, autonomous, and data-driven asset integrity and corrosion management.

As you will hear later in this conference, AI is at the heart of Aramco’s strategy, we are deploying it across our operations, and in 2024 alone we have realized $2 billion in value creation from AI solutions, with expectations to add similar value this year.

AI-powered solutions are now anticipating corrosion before it happens, leveraging a network of Industrial Internet of Things 
sensors across our facilities and pipelines. 

These sensors provide more than 10 million corrosion-monitoring readings annually across over 40 facilities, 63,000 pieces of static equipment, and 20,000 pipeline segments. 

This stream of data is analyzed through machine-learning models that not only predict potential degradation but also trigger automated work orders when thresholds are crossed, transforming prediction into action.

Multi-agent AI helps us not only to predict problems but also to prescribe solutions. 

It has already delivered significant value. This year, our Hawiyah NGL Plant Reliability Agent achieved a 40% reduction in planning time and a projected 15–20% reduction in annual maintenance costs.

AI agents designed to assist field operators are also under development, strengthening inspection programs and placing unprecedented diagnostic capabilities at their fingertips.

But, our ambition does not stop at Aramco’s facilities. We are combining our domain expertise and intellectual property with AI to develop advanced solutions that can benefit the entire energy and industrial community. 

We are also pursuing strategic collaborations with global AI technology leaders to augment our capabilities and redefine the future of asset integrity.

By protecting infrastructure in this way, we move toward a brighter, more sustainable future — one where our energy systems are stronger, more reliable, and more resilient.

This conference will help shape that future. Over the coming days, we will bring together expertise, creativity, and passion to address some of the most complex challenges facing our industry.

So, as we open the 19th edition of the Middle East Corrosion Conference, let us celebrate how far we have come and look forward, with confidence, to where we are going.

Let me welcome you once again, and on behalf of the entire Executive Committee, wish you a productive and enjoyable conference and exhibition.

Thank you.

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