Dr. Abdul-Jaleel A. Al-Khalifa has been elected to the presidency of the prestigious international Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE). Dr. Al-Khalifa has for the past ten years been employed by Saudi Aramco as manager of the Reservoir Description and Simulation Department. He will be the first SPE President to come from Asia; previous presidents have been exclusively from North America or Europe.

SPE is a global organization of 65,000 petroleum engineers; its Saudi Arabian section has about 700 members. Mr. Al-Khalifa will formally take over as president-elect in September 2005, and will act as full-time president from September 2006 to September 2007, continuing to serve, as past president, until September 2008. Mr. Al-Khalifa pledges to “bring the image of Saudi Arabia to this organization, as a country of professionals, a country with a positive global outlook, peaceful, and endowed with openness”. He added: “We have excellent people that should be given the chance to shine."

Dr. Al-Khalifa has long been a member of SPE, serving as a lecturer and technical editor and chairing a number of committees. He has gained distinction as a member, and has chaired SPE's international petroleum technology conference. His BS and MS degrees are from King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM), and in 1988 he earned a PhD in petroleum engineering from Stanford University in the United States. One of his plans is to set up new SPE branches in Latin America and Russia; there are already offices in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur as well as Dallas, Texas, and London, UK.

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