Chapter 3 Reading the Rocks - Saudi Aramco

80 energy to the world : Volume one
reading the rocks 81
Laundry workers in Bahrain wash
clothing in a spring-fed creek in the
1940s. The numbering system used
to track laundry was adopted by
Aramco as the basis for its employee
badge numbers. The 1940s-era
badges of Frank Tracy and Yousef
Al-Koheji are shown below.
The Dark Days By the early fall of 1936, the Casoc geologists sensed trouble. The rock strata
under the Dammam Dome at a depth where oil had been found on Bahrain were not producing as
expected. Rumors spread that officials in San Francisco were beginning to have second thoughts
and were trying to cut back on expenses wherever they could. Davies later recalled this period
as the “dark days” when “there was a lot of apprehension felt that maybe Saudi Arabia had not
been a good gamble after all.”
“What’s Your Number?”
Today every Saudi Aramco employee has an identification badge with an employee number.
However, this has not always been the case.
While some geologists began to second-guess themselves, Steineke stood firm. Not only
did Steineke avoid becoming distracted by the drilling problems in 1936, but he was using what
Davies described as his rare “ability to tie together obscure and isolated bits of information that
most men and even most geologists would miss completely.” Steineke, who was named chief
geologist in 1936, was in the process of identifying what Davies described as “certainly, the
outstanding monument to Max’s unusual abilities in Saudi Arabia.”
Davies recalled suffering through one particularly hot and hazy day in the latter part of 1936:
Max came to me and said, ”Fred, I want to take you out and show you the next
Saudi Arabian oil field.“ That sounded good to me. All we had was Dammam, so we
drove out southwest in the direction of where Abqaiq is now. … Max got out just like
a bird dog, started out through those sand dunes. Every one looked exactly alike to me,
and we finally landed up in a little cup between the sand dunes … in which there was an
outcrop of Eocene limestone. Max bent over and knocked off a hunk of rock, held it up
with great pride and said, ”See that, Fred, that’s Eocene limestone. …“ He pointed out
a distance of five miles [eight kilometers]—and I couldn’t see a quarter of a mile [400
meters]. ”That’s Jebel Dam.“ And then he pointed out, ”See, that’s Jebel [Ghuraymil],“
which was 10 miles [16 kilometers] away. … Oil, he said, in both these places had to be
below the ground. ”So, therefore, we have a structure there and we ought to drill it.”
I looked at him in astonishment, and I wouldn’t dare contradict him—”Certainly
you may be right, but I can’t even see what you are pointing at.“ But his enthusiasm
was such that in a short time we drilled right at that location and we found this big
Abqaiq field.
Casoc’s original operations were small enough that all record keeping was done using
employees’ last names. The only real confusion occurred when laundry was shipped weekly
to an Indian cleaning service in Bahrain, where the clothes were washed in what became
known as Button Creek, the runoff from an artesian spring. Clothes were mixed up when they
were washed, and employees often received the wrong garments. The later influx of workers
exacerbated the problem. To address this concern, in 1938 the company started assigning
numbers that employees could use to label their laundry. These numbers were generally
assigned chronologically in order of employment with the company. Vacated numbers were
reassigned to new employees when they arrived.
The number system worked so well for laundry that it was gradually used for other
purposes. Bahrain store owners, for example, started accepting chits with employee laundry
numbers on them instead of having employees haul bags of coins. Charles Rodstrom, Casoc’s
agent in Bahrain, redeemed the chits from merchants and forwarded them to Dhahran
where they would be deducted from employees’ “field allotments.” In 1944, the company
started using the laundry numbers to keep track of employees in all personnel systems. Floyd
Anderson, who was in charge of laundry at the time, assigned himself No. 1, but typically
the lower I.D. numbers corresponded to the earliest employees. For example, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz
Al-Shalfan, Aramco’s longest-serving employee when he died in 1983, was No. 4. Over the
past six decades, the I.D. numbers have become longer and the badges more intricate—the
numbers are now supplemented with bar codes, and holograms ensure the authenticity
of the badges—but they remain the primary means of administrative identification.
With the help of observations from his teams, Steineke had been able to deduce a considerable
amount of information from surface indications, including the probable location of the
Abqaiq field, which was confirmed by exploratory drilling a few years later.
Yet the geologists still lacked a comprehensive understanding of the sedimentary rock
strata underlying the huge concession. To help fill in the massive gaps in their knowledge, a
team led by Henry began a program of structure drilling in November 1936. Structure drilling,
a technique adapted by Steineke in response to the challenges posed by the sprawling Saudi
concession, involved drilling a number of relatively shallow wells of about 300 to 610 meters to
acquire samples of the underlying rocks. (Many of these wells were later turned into water wells
for the Bedouin tribes.) The samples from areas hundreds of kilometers apart were compared
to check, for example, for continuity of a particular layer of limestone at a given depth. It took
months, however, for the teams to begin comparing results and drawing conclusions.
Dahl Hit In late March and early April 1937, while the structure-drilling program was continuing,
Steineke made what many Socal geologists later realized was a historic trip. He led a large party,
including Lloyd Hamilton and Fred Davies from the Dhahran camp, to Riyadh and then on to
Jiddah, where Hamilton caught a steamer back to Socal’s London office and Davies continued
on to San Francisco.
On the return trip, Steineke, accompanied by chief mechanic Floyd Meeker, significantly
expanded his understanding of Arabian geology. The region they passed through west of Riyadh
marks the boundary between the ancient basement rock of the Arabian Shield and the sedimentary
layers of the Arabian Shelf. In many places along this interface, giant escarpments (or cliffs, the
most prominent being the Tuwaiq Escarpment) and deep wells or collapsed depressions reveal
hundreds of millions of years’ worth of sedimentary layering.
Just what Steineke observed on this trip and what conclusions he reached remain a matter
of conjecture. His journal notations do not provide absolute evidence. A veteran Saudi Aramco
geologist, Tom Keith, later pored over Steineke’s field books for a history of company geologists
and offered his insights about the return trip: