Hydrocarbon Disney World

Hello Pickle Nation, from the Kingdom. What, you may ask, am I doing in Saudi Arabia? I’m not sure, actually. I’m trying to figure that out. For reasons of fairness, confusion, and personal safety, I’m going to keep my powder dry on that subject until the end, which is in about a week. We’ve been here for three days. Until then, total cultural relativism and extreme benefit of the doubt. It’s a school trip; as my mother said, [see Genre-Crossing Metaphor Section]. For now, let me tell you about today’s activity.

For the first several days of the trip, we are being hosted by Saudi Aramco – the state-owned oil company – in Dhahran, on the east coast, next to Bahrain. Saudi Aramco has several compounds in the region, the main one of which, where we are staying, feels a bit like what I imagine a permanent military base must feel like. It’s completely self-contained, with a grocery store, hospital, gas station (biodiesel available – psych!), lovely residential streets, Texans, a golf course that was recently converted to grass from asphalt, and the guest house, which is really a hotel, from which I write this post.

Today, we took a 30-minute bus ride from Dhahran to the Saudi Aramco Airfield, and then a 90-minute prop-plane trip to the Shaybah oil field in the Empty Quarter. (As you can see, Saudi Aramco has kept us on the straight and narrow. We’ll see if that guided-tour-of-what-we-want-you-to-see approach reigns for the remainder of the trip – I’ll let you know, again, at the end.)

The Empty Quarter is nearly beyond description. Flying there, the desert was like a white, then pink, then red ocean of ripples and ridges and flats. Nothing, forever. Then a single road as we descended. And then, at the end of our descent, the contoured plain was revealed to be made of mountains of marble-smooth sand a thousand meters high. Mars. As one of my classmates said this evening, as we came in to dinner from watching the sunset over the red dunes, “This explains why the Bedouins were such poets.”

We landed on an airstrip in a long flat valley between high dunes that was later revealed to have originally been two neighboring valleys, linked by the removal of 100 million cubic meters of sand. Fine, soft sand, frolicked upon and then calculated to take only 10 to the 25th grains to make this desert that is a quarter of Saudi Arabia. Give or take.

That sand-removal process was one part of a massive three-year construction project to begin oil production at the Shaybah oil field, which was first discovered 40 years ago, but which was only deemed economically feasible 10 years ago. In order to wring 500,000 barrels of Arabian Extra Light Crude from the red, scorched emptiness, Saudi Aramco put 15,000 people to work building 630 km of pipeline, 400 km of road, three gas-oil separation plants, a major expansion of the port refinery that would handle the increased capacity, a desalination plant, four 60 MW power plants, an airport, a small town, and 140 state-of-the-art horizontal wells, each of which is drilled roughly 3000 meters down to the field, then as far as 12 km horizontally. All this in three years, in one of the most hostile, remote places on earth.

Once production started, Shaybah broke even in 11 months. Ladies and Germs, this is an oil boom.