Refinery Planning Economist

Company profile; Saudi Arabia; On-site; SAR 200,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading global energy company based in Saudi Arabia is looking for a Refinery Planning Economist to optimize crude allocation and improve profitability across its refineries. The ideal candidate will have a Bachelor's degree in Engineering and at least 8 years of experience in the refining business, alongside expertise in linear programming and commercial optimization. The role involves working closely with multiple stakeholders to ensure optimal performance and investment strategies.

Benefits

World-scale project experience

Investment in talent development

Challenging and rewarding professional opportunities

Qualifications

• 8+ years of experience in the refining business, including technical and commercial aspects.
• Experience using LP models.
• Thorough understanding of engineering practices and economic principles.

Responsibilities

• Drive commercial optimization at refinery level.
• Generate crude relative values and rankings.
• Coordinate with stakeholders for production month optimizations.

Skills

Commercial optimization

Linear programming modeling

Engineering practices

Economic principles

Cross-cultural communication

Education

Bachelor degree in Engineering

MBA

Job description

Overview

We are seeking a Refinery Planning Economist to join our Global Optimizer Department (GOD).

The (GOD) charter is to optimize crude allocation and the operations of global manufacturing facilities in order to maximize revenue, increase profitability, and capture international market opportunities. The division also acts as the linear programming (LP) gatekeeper for wholly owned refineries and the integrated global MPIMS model, which is used for optimizing global crude allocation and exploration of new international markets and integration options.

Your primary role is to work with refineries, Aramco Trading Company (ATC) and the Global Optimizer team to optimize refinery’s crude allocation, crude mix, and products slates. With expertise in refinery operations, market dynamics, commercial capabilities, and linear programming modelling, will produce a sound plan to help ensure the highest returns of Aramco’s downstream assets; and is also accountable to develop, monitor and execute the monthly short operating plan.

Key Responsibilities

• Drive commercial optimization at the local LP runs at the individual refinery.
• Responsible to generate crude relative values and crude ranking.
• Provide monthly major constraints impact on asset for logistic unit performance and investment requirements needed.
• Review and challenge constraints to the individual LPs of each refinery (potentially run limited constraint model to create the baseline for ideal LP output).
• Coordinate with ATC to reflect Saudi Aramco’s market perspective on the individual Refinery LPs.
• Create sensitivities, trade-offs and scenarios for each of the individual LPs.
• Work with other asset economists within the same region to consolidate the LPs of refineries within the same region and explore optimization opportunities.
• Defend refinery interest during trade-off evaluations (after the central optimization team issues LP differentials) while keeping integrated optimization objective in mind.
• Provide both market and refinery operations outlook for yearly business plan.
• Coordinate with the refineries, ATC and the central Optimization team (and potentially other stakeholders) to execute short-term (within the production month) optimization opportunities.
• Identify, assess and review strategic and commercial viability of potential identified investment opportunities to improve overall viability of the system.

Minimum Requirements

As the successful candidate you will hold a Bachelor degree in Engineering discipline, an MBA is preferable.

• At least 8 years’ experience in refining business, to include technical and commercial aspects.
• Experience using LP models is .
• Thorough knowledge of engineering practices, economic principles and calculation methods.
• Expert in international business and cross-cultural professional practices.

Job Posting Duration

Start Date: 7/3/2025

End Date: 12/31/2025

Working environment

Our high-performing employees are drawn by the challenging and rewarding professional, technical and industrial opportunities we offer, and are remunerated accordingly.

At Aramco, our people work on truly world-scale projects, supported by investment in capital and technology that is second to none. And because, as a global energy company, we are faced with addressing some of the world’s biggest technical, logistical and environmental challenges, we invest heavily in talent development.

We have a proud history of educating and training our workforce over many decades. Employees at all levels are encouraged to improve their sector-specific knowledge and competencies through our workforce development programs – one of the largest in the world.