Saudi energy-industrial leadership rhetoric: A critical discourse analysis of metaphor, agency, and legitimacy in Aramco's 2024 sustainability reports

Abstract

Saudi Aramco's Arabic sustainability communication occupies a difficult rhetorical position. It must present continued hydrocarbon production as economically and socially necessary while also presenting the company as a credible participant in a lower-emissions future. This article examines how that position is made persuasive in the company's official Arabic Sustainability Report 2024 and selected leadership, strategy, and governance sections of its Arabic Annual Report 2024. The study combines critical metaphor analysis with transitivity, social-actor analysis, and van Leeuwen's account of legitimation. The page-bounded corpus contains 20,185 raw tokens and 18,262 cleaned tokens distributed across 187 layout-defined prose blocks and 687 clause units. Lexical scans guided, but did not replace, close reading. The analysis finds that leadership is constructed through an interlocking repertoire of journey, growth, architecture, vision, and rank metaphors. Aramco repeatedly appears as the named agent of investment, development, reduction, and protection, whereas energy demand, technological change, and the transition itself often appear as autonomous pressures. Legitimation consequently works on two levels: authorization aligns corporate conduct with national and international frameworks, while rationalization links hydrocarbon continuity to reliability, affordability, and orderly change. Moral evaluation adds the vocabulary of responsibility, citizenship, safety, and care. The result is not a simple denial of environmental strain. It is a calibrated leadership narrative in which accountability for operational improvement is accepted, but the pace and boundaries of structural change are discursively redistributed across markets, technologies, governments, and global demand.