Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia’s powerful oil minister and architect of the Arab world’s effort to control its own energy resources in the 1970s and its subsequent ability to affect oil production, fuel prices and international affairs, died In London. He was 90 years old.
His death was announced on Tuesday by Saudi state television.
In an era of turbulent energy policy, Yamani, a Harvard-trained lawyer, spoke for Arab oil producers on the world stage as the industry resisted Arab-Israeli wars, a revolution in Iran and growing pains. World demand for oil has elevated the governments of Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Persian Gulf to kingdoms of unimaginable wealth. Crossing Europe, Asia and America to promote Arab oil interests, he met government leaders, went on television and became widely known. In a flowing Arabian robe or a Savile Row suit, speaking English or French, he crossed cultures, loving classical European music and writing Arabic poetry.
Yamani generally struggled for price stability and organized markets, but he is best known for architecting a 1973 oil embargo that led to rising global prices, shortages of gasoline and a search for smaller cars, renewable energy sources and independence of Arab oil.
As Saudi oil minister from 1962 to 1986, Mr. Yamani was the most powerful commoner in a kingdom that possessed some of the largest oil reserves in the world. For almost 25 years, he was also the dominant officer of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, whose rising and falling production quotas rippled like tides in world markets.
In 1972, Yamani decided to take control of the vast oil reserves in the Gulf of Aramco, the consortium of four American oil companies that had long exploited them. While Arab leaders demanded the nationalization of Aramco – an acquisition that could have cost Americans technical and marketing knowledge, as well as capital – Yamani adopted a more moderate strategy.
Under the framework of the “participation” agreement negotiated by Mr. Yamani, Saudi Arabia gained the rights to acquire 25 percent of foreign concessions immediately and to gradually increase its holdings for control. Aramco, for its part, continued to operate its concessions, profiting from the extraction, refining and commercialization of oil, although it had to pay much higher fees to the Saudi government.
The business maintained the flow of oil to a dependent industrialized world and gave Arab oil producers time to develop their own technical and marketing knowledge. These developments eventually brought enormous prosperity to the Gulf states and a drastic shift in economic and political power in the region.
In 1973, after Israel defeated Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur War and Arab leaders demanded the use of oil as a political weapon, Yamani engendered an embargo to pressure the United States and other allies to withdraw support for Israel and Israel. Israel withdraws from occupied Arab lands. The embargo sent shockwaves around the world, caused a break in the North Atlantic alliance and tilted Japan and other nations towards the Arabs.
But the United States kept the line. President Richard M. Nixon created an energy czar. Gasoline rationing and price controls were imposed. There were long lines and occasional fights at the bomb. Although inflation has persisted for years, there has been a new emphasis on energy exploration and conservation, including, for a time, a national speed limit of 55 miles per hour on highways.
A tall man with thoughtful eyes and a Van Dyke goatee, Mr. Yamani looked to Westerners graceful, cunning and tenacious.
“He speaks softly and never hits the table,” an American oil executive told The New York Times. “When discussions get heated, he becomes more patient. In the end, he gets what he wants with what appears to be sweet reasonableness, but it is kind of hard. “
In 1975, Mr. Yamani had two violent encounters. His patron, King Faisal, was murdered by a royal nephew in Riyadh. Nine months later, he and other OPEC ministers were taken hostage by terrorists led by Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as Carlos the Jackal.
For years after the embargo, Yamani struggled to contain oil prices, believing that Saudi’s long-term interest was to prolong global dependence on affordable oil. But the overthrow of the Shah of Iran in the 1979 Islamic Revolution triggered an energy crisis. Iranian production plummeted, prices skyrocketed, purchases panicked, increased OPEC stocks flooded the market and prices fell again.
In 1986, after a prolonged excess of world oil and disagreements between Yamani and the royal family over quotas and prices, King Fahd dismissed the oil minister, ending his 24 years as the most famous non-royal in Saudi Arabia.
Ahmed Zaki Yamani was born on June 30, 1930, in Mecca, the holy city of the pilgrimage of Islam, one of the three children of Hassan Yamani, an Islamic law judge. The surname originated in Yemen, the land of its ancestors. The boy was devoutly religious, getting up early to pray before school. Sent abroad for higher education, he graduated from King Fuad I University in Cairo in 1951, New York University in 1955 and Harvard Law School in 1956.
He is Laila Sulleiman Faidhi married in 1955 and had three children. His second wife was Tamam al-Anbar; they married in 1975 and had five children.
In 1958, the royal family enlisted him to advise Crown Prince Faisal, and his rise was rapid. Within a year, he was Minister of State without portfolio and, in 1962, Minister of Petroleum. In 1963, Mr. Yamani and Aramco jointly founded a Saudi College of Petroleum and Minerals, to teach Arab students about the oil industry.
After his resignation as oil minister, Mr. Yamani became a consultant, entrepreneur and investor and settled in Crans-sur-Sierre, Switzerland. In 1982, he joined other financiers at Investcorp, a privately held company based in Bahrain. In 1990, he founded the Center for Global Energy Research, a London market analysis group. A biography, “Yamani: The Inside Story”, by Jeffrey Robinson, was published in 1989.
Ben Hubbard contributed reports.