Women Innovators

• Aramco’s R&D work focuses on innovations that aim to help future generations to continue to have access to reliable energy
• Dr. Nadrah Alawani, Dr. Amani Musharah and Maryam Altaher have led and worked on innovations that have raised the bars in their respective fields and the energy sector as a whole
• From gaining new understanding of hydrocarbons, to formulating better performing fuels that could help lower emissions, women innovators at Aramco continue to break new scientific ground

Aramco’s research and development work focuses on innovations that aim to help future generations to continue to have access to the benefits of a more secure, more sustainable energy supply. Scientific and technological advances that can help us to achieve this goal are happening in our R&D centers around the world, including three in Saudi Arabia. Women have long played a leading role in Aramco’s drive for innovation, and their talents and expertise are continuing to help us to make advances in science, technology and engineering.

Three leading female scientists based at our Research and Development Center in Dhahran explain how their innovative work in fuel analysis, catalysis and petroleomics is raising standards in fuel performance, efficiency and emissions reduction across the Company’s operations, and across the oil and gas industry.

Petroleomics is the science of “understanding the oil at its most profound, molecular level,” says Dr. Nadrah Alawani, who has worked at Aramco for seven years. It is a science on which research and technology development heavily depends, especially technologies that create value from crude oil.

She uses mass spectrometry, an analytical technique used to obtain the molecular weight of the compounds contained within a substance. Crude oil is a complex mix, knowing the molecular weights helps in identifying the structure and molecular formula of the fractions – the types of hydrocarbons contained within the oil. This is immensely useful for the successful characterization of petroleum samples—which is fundamental in supporting several applications including oil exploration, catalyst development, and process optimization.

“Studying oil at this level is extraordinarily powerful across the value chain, for solving flow assurance issues, for feed selection and blending, and for catalyst development. It helps our researchers to optimize Aramco’s products,” says Dr. Alawani, who leads the analytical work in the projects she works on.

This detailed information holds great value for the Company because “the long-chain hydrocarbons and aromatic hydrocarbons are what gives oil its characteristics—whether it is light or heavy, sweet or sour,” she adds.

In 2019, a team of Aramco scientists led by Dr. Amani Musharah worked on a project to enable the Company to push more oil through an existing pipeline, by analyzing and assessing new grades of a chemical additive that would  be combined with the crude oil to increase its flow-rate. Their work would help to determine whether a costly new pipeline would need to be built to meet increasing customer demand.

The analysis showed that a new, commercially available additive—a drag-reducing agent which lets more fuel flow through a pipeline without requiring the use of more energy—would allow the flow of oil to increase to such a degree that the construction of the new pipeline, at a cost of $500 million, would no longer be required.

“The additive we worked with was unfamiliar to us—we had to make a decision based on our expertise in fuels and crude oils analysis.

“Everything that goes into Aramco fuels gets evaluated by my team first. We decide what makes a good or bad additive,” explains Dr. Musharah, who has worked at Aramco for 14 years, and gained her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Manchester in the UK.

Worldwide, the majority of cars on the road are expected to be powered by traditional internal combustion engines well into the next decade. So, making more efficient engines, and lower-carbon fuels, is a priority when it comes to reducing carbon emissions, and Maryam Altaher and her team at Aramco have been working with automakers around the world on both these goals.

Mrs. Altaher has been fascinated by chemistry since she was at high school, and brings this enthusiasm to her work at Aramco: “I can remember like it was yesterday, the teacher explaining organic chemical reactions and how we can play with the results by switching the reagents, based on the knowledge we have. I thought it was beautiful, I fell in love with it.”

Mrs. Altaher, who has worked at Aramco as a lab scientist specializing in fuel chemistry for six years, has been part of an R&D agreement with automaker Honda since 2017. The agreement specifically focuses on formulating fuel for Gasoline Compression Ignition (GCI) engines, which have the potential to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions by 25 percent.

The objective of the research is to reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions from internal combustion engines, while lowering levels of pollutants such as NOx and smoke emissions.

The work of these three leading scientists demonstrates Aramco's pursuit of innovation to gain new understanding of hydrocarbons, improve processes, formulate better performing fuels and lower engine emissions. From understanding crude oil at the most detailed molecular level of its composition, to working with carmakers on practical solutions to overcome the remaining challenges facing bringing GCI engines to market, women innovators at Aramco continue to break new scientific ground.