Honeywell’s role in Saudi digitalisation and sustainability

Saudi Arabia

Abdullah Al-Juffali, Honeywell’s country president for Saudi Arabia & Bahrain, talks to The Energy Year about the importance of Saudi Arabia and the Middle East in the company’s growth portfolio. Honeywell is a software-industrial company that blends physical products with software solutions to help companies improve performance, efficiency, safety and security, and profitability.

How important is Saudi Arabia and the Middle East region in Honeywell’s growth portfolio?
Saudi Arabia is a major strategic pillar of our regional operations and is crucial for our global business. We have been present in the kingdom since 1948 and have constantly grown our local presence in the country since then. We’re proud to be a trusted technology partner to Aramco across a range of fields including both sustainability and digital transformation.
We have a main office in Riyadh, as well as other offices and advanced technology centres in Jeddah, Dhahran, Yanbu, Jazan, Jubail and Dammam. Earlier in 2023 we also announced a new advanced manufacturing hub at SPARK that will become our eighth office in the country.
The new facility reflects an investment strategy that is aligned with the localisation objectives of Vision 2030 and Aramco’s IKTVA [In-Kingdom Total Value Add] programme to advance local capabilities in R&D and the manufacturing of cutting-edge technology.
The facility will include engineering, manufacturing and assembly lines for producing our industrial automation and control equipment, field instruments, rugged mobile computers, gas detection equipment, fire safety systems and building-management-systems hardware.
We have around 400 employees in Saudi Arabia working across engineering, sales, customer support and advanced manufacturing, and around half of these are Saudi nationals. 25% of our Saudi employees are Saudi women, and this is a number we are focused on increasing as part of our global commitment to driving inclusion and diversity.
We have two automation colleges in Dhahran and Jubail and long-standing relationships with academic institutions such as KFUPM [King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals] to advance engineering career opportunities for future generations of highly skilled Saudi talent.

How does Honeywell approach digitalisation and sustainability in the post-pandemic era?
Industry has been using digital transformation for more than a decade to uncover hidden productivity and cost benefits across operations. However, today digital transformation has also become the first critical step for any meaningful sustainability strategy.
This is because it helps you understand very clearly where your inefficiencies lie, and AI and machine learning can even propose and automate remedial actions to make immediate improvements to energy intensity or other parameters relating to your sustainability objectives.
Digitalisation makes transparent the cost savings associated with sustainability actions, so you can tie together investment and returns across your sustainability-related roadmap. And it gives you the right insights to accurately report your sustainability performance too.
We use our Honeywell Forge software-as-a-service suite to help customers do exactly that. Honeywell Forge is a portfolio of cloud-based technologies that turns operational data into insights for a range of specific goals. We are seeing more customers from across sectors turn to Honeywell Forge to get a picture of how they are performing against sustainability targets.

Tell us about the joint venture you established with Aramco.
Our joint venture with Aramco epitomises the opportunity that digital transformation is bringing to industry and underscores the leadership that the kingdom is demonstrating in this space.
We are working with Aramco to fully digitalise their end-to-end plant management operating system, known as iMOMS, to offer a comprehensive view and expansive control of operations for a wide range of different industries.
The JV leverages Aramco’s deep understanding of managing complex plant environments and our know-how in digitalisation, big data management and AI to bring new cost efficiency, productivity and uptime benefits to industrial operations of all kinds. The collaboration is expected to create more than 500 jobs in Saudi Arabia within five years, and we are looking forward to making more announcements about it later in 2023.

How important is public-private collaboration for reaching Saudi Arabia’s sustainability goals?
To meet ambitious sustainability targets, you need a willingness and ability to invest, a deep understanding of the energy sector and its core role in a sustainable transition, a public sector commitment to fostering innovation and the right partnerships with technology leaders who can deliver the solutions needed to reverse climate change. Saudi Arabia has all of these in abundance.
Saudi Arabia’s vision spells out a need to improve energy efficiency by 30% between now and 2030. The country is rolling out 12 million smart meters, cutting methane emissions and investing in sustainability-focused megaprojects such as the NEOM Green Hydrogen Complex and SPARK [King Salman Energy Park] to help it achieve its carbon-neutral goal by 2060.
The government’s willingness to partner with and develop strong private-sector innovation is a key enabler of this roadmap.

What energy transition solutions and technologies are you bringing to the table?
We have a portfolio of technologies to help customers meet their sustainability goals today, and we are working on other exciting innovations that will be transformational in the years to come.
We currently see a huge opportunity for our Solstice product in Saudi Arabia. This hydrofluoroolefin technology is primarily used as a refrigerant or in insulation and has significantly less global warming potential compared to the older hydrofluorocarbon-based products it replaces.
Globally, the use of Honeywell Solstice has already helped avoid the potential release of the equivalent of more than 326 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
We are a world leader in carbon capture and hydrogen production technology. We currently have more than 1,100 installations of H2 purification technologies around the world, and we view the retrofit of existing assets with carbon capture technology as a commercially proven and significant step towards carbon neutrality.
Other areas that we see opportunities in include our portfolio of grid management and battery technologies, which support an increase in renewables in the overall energy mix.

What role will sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) play in Saudi Arabia’s energy roadmap in the future?
We’re very bullish on the role of SAF going forward, not only in Saudi Arabia but around the world. Globally, aviation makes up around 2% of total greenhouse gas emissions, but the problem is that it is a sector that is very hard to decarbonise. SAF is going to be a large part of the solution to that problem.
The main barrier to SAF today is feedstock. That’s why we are investing heavily in new technologies that expand the range of feedstocks that can be used to produce SAF.
For example, we have our Ecofining solution that enables fats, oils and greases to be used as a feed to produce renewable jet fuel and diesel that’s suitable as a drop-in replacement to petroleum fuel. We have also just announced our new eFining solution for producing eSAF. eFuels combine green hydrogen and carbon dioxide to produce eMethanol, which can then be converted into a wide range of sustainable fuels, including eSAF, eGasoline and eDiesel.
We are working with customers on co-processing SAF using their existing assets, which represents a fast, cost-efficient path to SAF production at the blend volumes that are required by carriers today.

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