Saudi Aramco has a $50 billion dollar subsidiary called SABIC whose purpose is to take oil byproducts and refine them into plastics. Does Saudi Arabia have a huge plastic market? Or did they just think, hey, we could export this shit elsewhere for more money!

You literally let an Australian company process it to higher value products and ship it? That's literally what every oil major has done with their resources.

They could process it themselves and consume or export those higher value materials

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42593404

Australia itself doesn't have the demand for that much steel internally - China does (and exports its excess production).

> and exports its excess production

Which is exactly what Australia could do if it made a bunch of steel.

> China does (and exports its excess production).

With no small amount of it exported to Australia.