Chapter 3 Reading the Rocks - Saudi Aramco

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84 energy to the world : Volume one reading the rocks 85 Simply put, this dictum left all of Socal’s money riding on one well. Lester Hilyard, a veteran drilling foreman, was transferred from Bahrain to Saudi Arabia in February 1937 specifically to work on this project. Drilling often ground to a halt as the crew awaited spare parts or for drill bits to be repaired in the machine shop in Bahrain. Hilyard vividly recalled the sense of unease around the camp as the months passed amid mounting rumors that the entire enterprise was riding on the success of Well No. 7: “Although in the beginning each day of drilling seemed to be more discouraging than the day before, the company continued a certain amount of building in progress throughout 1937, maybe to demonstrate to the King that it wasn’t ready to give up. It had been rumored for some time that, not only the King of Saudi Arabia, but some of the chiefs back on the reservation (Socal in San Francisco) were getting restless.” Barger quickly realized how fortunate he was to be working with a geologist as insightful and intuitive as Steineke and with Khamis, the gifted guide. The three men spent many weeks over the next few years working elbow to elbow during the day, mapping elevations and searching for geological outcroppings or other signposts. At night they swapped stories about jinn (or genies, supernatural spirits), and cowboys and Indians, around the campfire. Barger recognized the kindred spirit his two compatriots shared and in the process revealed his own uncanny skills at acknowledging an individual’s abilities, regardless of background. It was a characteristic that served him well throughout his career with the company: I am still amazed that in a month’s time I met and became good friends with perhaps the two most remarkable men I was ever to encounter in my life. Max Steineke and Khamis ibn Rimthan, though born on opposite ends of the earth and as physically different as they could be—the one, big and boisterous; the other, a rangy and slightly self-effacing man of medium height—were effectively cut from the same cloth. Energetic, intelligent men, when subjected to physical hardships, stinging winds, poor food and worse water, they never mentioned it unless it was an occasion for a good joke. On the desert, Khamis was never lost. For in addition to his sixth sense, a sort of infallible, built-in compass, he had an extraordinary memory that could recall a bush that he had passed as a young man or the directions to a well that someone had told him about 10 years before. Under the desert, among the strata of rocks and sediment that are the geologist’s domain, Max was much the same as Khamis, able to relate an outcropping he might find on the coast to a paragraph in a thick geological report that he had read years earlier. Figuratively as well as literally, they both seemed always to know where they were and where they were going next. Global Positioning The American geologists arriving in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s took great pains to track their position—using theodolites and other instruments to calculate latitude, getting the precise time from radio signals to mark longitude, and calibrating car odometers to help plot their progress across kilometer after kilometer of what often seemed a wasteland of sand, gravel and salt flat. Khamis ibn Rimthan and other Bedouins who worked with the oilmen had no need for such aids. For them, the desert features in all directions were nearly as easy to read by day as the free road maps that were popular handouts at U.S. gasoline stations. By night, Bedouins followed illuminated signs—provided gratis by the stars and planets. Of the many Bedouins who worked closely with the Casoc geologists in the early years of exploring the concession, Khamis’s outgoing nature and extraordinary guiding skills made him a natural favorite. A member of the ‘Ujman tribe, which had rebelled against the King when he was unifying Arabia’s diverse tribes and regions under his control, Khamis had migrated with many of his tribesmen from al-Hasa to the southern reaches of present-day Iraq in the 1920s in search of safer grazing lands. In an indication of the importance that King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz put on the success of the exploration venture—and of Khamis’s renowned abilities— the governor of al-Hasa, who was also the King’s cousin, personally sent for Khamis to return to his native region to help the geologists find their way across the poorly mapped expanses. Khamis quickly bonded with American geologists, such as Tom Barger and Max Steineke, and left them in awe over his navigational and survival techniques. He worked with the oil company until his death from cancer in 1959. However, his legacy did not end there. The company named the Rimthan field in honor of him after it was discovered 95 kilometers east of Qaisumah in 1974. Geologists Tom Barger, Walt Hoag, Max Steineke and Jerry Harriss, left to right, pause during surveying near Salwah in 1937. Barger, a future CEO of the oil company, quickly caught the attention of Chief Geologist Steineke. remarkable relationship On December 14, 1937, with all the attention focused on a visit of Crown Prince and future King Sa‘ud ibn ‘Abd al-‘Aziz to the area, it was not likely that too many people noticed another arrival that afternoon: a bespectacled, lovesick young geologist named Tom Barger. Barger, who rose through the ranks to become one of the most influential CEOs in the oil company’s history, had secretly married less than a month before in North Dakota and left his young bride, Kathleen, to live with her parents while he joined Casoc’s exploration effort in Saudi Arabia. Legendary Bedouin guide Khamis ibn Rimthan, right, and his fellow guide Muhammed ‘Ali Al-Kathiri, shown in April 1935, played crucial roles in helping early geologists navigate both the deserts and local customs.
86 energy to the world : Volume one reading the rocks 87 Philip McConnell arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1938 and served as Casoc’s chief petroleum engineer during the war years. He later wrote a book, titled The Hundred Men, based on his wartime experiences. Foreign Correspondents Letters to family and friends from oil company geologists and engineers in Saudi Arabia during the 1930s and ’40s provided unique ”snapshots” of life in the oil camp and on the still largely untamed and exotic deserts of Arabia. Nestor John Sander was a young paleontologist in 1938 and one of hundreds of new Casoc hires following the successful drilling of Dammam Well No. 7. Sander worked for Socal for a few months in California before being sent to Saudi Arabia in November 1938. He and two geologists embarked on a monthlong odyssey across the United States, Europe and the Near East en route to Dhahran, an adventure typical of the journeys undertaken by the next generation of oilmen to be summoned to the desert to build upon the promise unleashed by the discovery of Well No. 7. Sander later recalled his first days in camp: At that moment Dhahran, as I saw it, was a rather broad street, unpaved; on one side there was a dining hall and the drillers’ quarters, which was a twostory gutch-coated building, while the dining hall next to it was but one story. On the other side of the street was the little paleo lab, a tin-roofed shack that also housed the telephone exchange and a number of other buildings. And on the hill at the north end of the street were a few tanks. I imagine most of them were for water, because there really wasn’t any significant production at that moment. … … I slept for the first month or two or three in the hallway of the driller’s hotel or whatever you want to call it. There was a series of rooms on the two floors, and each driller had his own room and in that room was a window air-conditioner. Central air conditioning was installed later, but it was not available at that time. They slept cool but in January, February and March the temperature is bearable. But my main problem was that the drillers changed shifts at midnight, so there I was on my cot in the hallway, and these people were going by, which didn’t help much. After three or four months they constructed a series of green metal cabins under a palm-thatched roof. And they were air-conditioned, so I was very happy when that happened. For the first three weeks I remember that I didn’t know if I wanted to be there or not. A tinge of homesickness and loneliness. In the early years of the concession, the geologists and Khamis developed a relationship that was more the exception than the rule. Khamis was hired specifically for his specialized skill and worked with highly trained, well-educated men who valued his abilities and unique personality. Most Saudis during this period were hired as unskilled construction, transportation or drilling crew workers. They had to be taught almost everything they needed to know on the work site. Their histories were not as well recorded by the American oilmen as Khamis’s, yet their contributions were vital to the success of the industry they were helping to build. Barger made a unique contribution to chronicling the early history of the company through his letters home, collected by his son Tim and later released in the book Out in the Blue in 2000. The letters provide a snapshot of oil camp life in the late 1930s and early 1940s, years that marked a turning point in the development of the concession in Saudi Arabia. The initial period of exploring untamed spaces and carving a drilling site out of the unmarked desert was drawing to an end. New Era By the early spring of 1938, after almost five years of grinding effort, multiple false starts and dashed hopes only to be followed by new intimations of success, Dammam Well No. 7’s ultimate fate—indeed the fate of the entire Arabian enterprise—was being debated by Socal department heads in San Francisco. One question was on everyone’s mind as they pondered what to do about Well No. 7: “What does Max Steineke think?” below The October 16, 1936, issue of the New York World Telegram carries optimistic news of Socal’s prospects for finding oil in Saudi Arabia. Pat Doyle, a gifted young draftsman as well as geologist, illustrated his letters home with drawings of Arabian landscapes, wildlife and people. left An unidentified well in Dhahran blows traces of oil in early 1938. A test of Well No. 7 on March 3, 1938, signaled the beginning of a new era: Saudi Arabia had joined the ranks of oil-producing nations.
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Chapter 3 Reading the Rocks - Saudi Aramco

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