From hydrocarbon continuity to low-carbon promise: Temporality, modality, and transition narratives in Aramco's 2024 Arabic sustainability discourse

Abstract

Energy-transition discourse is built as much from time as from technology. Dates, aspect, modal verbs, targets, scenarios, and disclaimers determine whether a corporate statement describes accomplished change, ongoing work, intended investment, conditional possibility, or distant ambition. This article examines those distinctions in Saudi Aramco's official Arabic Sustainability Report 2024 and selected market, strategy, sustainability, and forward-looking sections of its Arabic Annual Report 2024. The page-bounded corpus comprises 31,457 raw tokens and 28,446 cleaned tokens across 268 layout-defined prose blocks and 1,114 clause units. A discourse-pragmatic analysis distinguishes completed action, continuing process, dated commitment, volitional intention, predictive possibility, and cautionary qualification. It then traces how these temporal forms are assembled into narratives of continuity and transition. The findings show a dual chronology. Hydrocarbon demand and supply are represented through durable, near-continuous time: they “continue,” “remain,” and are expected to retain importance. Lower-carbon initiatives are organized through milestones, project schedules, and ambitions extending to 2030, 2035, and 2050. The contrast does not make the latter empty, since several promises have explicit metrics, scopes, and interim dates. Yet grammatical commitment varies considerably. Completed operational reductions sit beside intentions to expand hydrocarbon-linked businesses, while technological benefits are often conditional on successful testing, market formation, and policy support. Aramco's transition narrative therefore operates through temporal layering: present continuity underwrites future experimentation, and future promise legitimates present continuity. The article proposes a six-part commitment test for distinguishing accountable corporate pledges from aspirational direction without treating either as self-evidently credible or insincere.