When one thinks of Saudi Arabia, oil instantly pops to mind. The country lays claim to producing one out of nine barrels consumed around the world every day.

The Kingdom made its first discovery back in 1933. In the early days, Standard Oil of California was calling all the shots and it left a legacy.

The sprawling campus here has Southern California written all over it, including US styled tract homes, white picket fences and horse stables.

The look may still be American, but the Aramco of today clearly has a Saudi DNA. Executives are proud of being known as the world’s lowest cost producer and having what they say is the best track record in oilfield management.

But the low-profile oil giant is in the process of being opened up to the outside world by Deputy Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman who wants Aramco to play a central role in his “2030 Vision”.

Through an IPO, the Prince wants to unlock over $2 trillion of value — an ambitious goal after the steep decline in oil prices. By 2018, up to 5 per cent could be listed on a combination of stock exchanges that could include New York, London, Hong Kong and Riyadh.

Aramco is the largest single producer of crude by a wide margin. At 10 million barrels a day, it has more than double the output of its closest competitor Russia’s Rosneft.

I had a rare one-day peak inside Aramco that started at HQ in Dhahran and finished in the Shaybah field in the fabled Empty Quarter on the border of the UAE. An hourlong briefing was led by chief executive Amin Nasser, who seems at ease preparing his team of 64,000 employees for the big bad world on global markets.

“Privatising this, let’s call it the crown jewel is something important and it’s a vote of confidence of what we have. Sharing that with the rest of the world is important,” Nasser told me in our one-on-one interview.

He is not deterred by today’s price of $40-$50 and deftly deflected my question about whether it would have been much wiser to undertake an offering when oil was averaging $100.

“The oil market is always cyclical … It will take some time and the prices will be where they will be when we start listing,” added Nasser.

Before my arrival to the Eastern Province, there were reports that Aramco was already in discussions with three potential partners: ExxonMobil, BP and Sinopec of China. But Nasser did not hesitate in swatting away that speculation.

“We have not any discussions with any of these companies on the privatisation,” he said.

But what stood out for me during my day in Aramco-land is how the Deputy Crown Prince wants to maximise all the skills the energy giant has to offer. The company is being utilised as a Trojan horse that will be brought in to lead the Prince’s reform agenda.

Aramco has already overseen the building of training centers, primary schools, motorways and the largest university in the country, the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) north of Jeddah.

That may just be the entree. Nasser said within a decade, Aramco will be responsible for creating a half a million jobs in the country, 200 small and medium sized enterprises and 50 technology companies.

The mandate for Aramco mirrors that of the company’s chairman Khalid Al Falih, who took over not only as the minister of energy, but will oversee the ministries of industry and minerals in an expanded portfolio.

Al Falih has been at Saudi Aramco since 1979 and has built a reputation as a no-nonsense man of his word who, like Aramco, delivers. But it begs the question, is the bar being set too high for team Saudi Aramco?

The hard-charging Mohammed bin Salman is a man in a hurry. After the country burnt through $115 billion of reserves last year, he is eager to break the addiction to oil. He needs to jump-start growth of just over 1 per cent and create jobs. Unemployment is running over 11 per cent; the youth jobless rate is more than double that level.

The changes that I see on the ground led me to recall an interview I conducted 15 years ago with Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, when he was CEO of Nestle. We talked about his biggest lesson as a global business leader.

Having waited two decades to get the top job at the Swiss food giant, he talked of sprinting out of the starting blocks wanting to transform a $237 billion company.

One year into the effort, he realised his colleagues were struggling to keep pace. He regrouped and as the saying goes, the rest is history. Today Nestle is one of the most valued brands in the world.

The global community is watching to see if Saudi Aramco — with a targeted value 10 times that of Nestle — can avoid stumbling and deliver all that the young prince has in mind.

The writer is Emerging Markets Editor at CNNMoney.