Aramco Expats

Next Jobs - Chapter 2

1. Pipeline
2. In Search Of Oil
3. Assignment Arabia

Author: Nestor J. Sander
Released 17 July 2002

Nearly a year went by before the exploratory test, Abqaiq No.1, was ready to spud on this prospect. I spent four long hot months at another wildcat, Abu Hadriya No.1, replacing Ursel Armstrong, (‘Army’). I slept in a high-ceilinged, zinc-plated, corrugated iron shed, the ‘Steineke Hotel’. A sink had been installed in a corner of the building in which were twelve cots for transients. The drillers slept in small, individual corrugated iron huts. A sheet-iron mess-hall, a club house, a mess hall and an office-storage building completed the camp. Palm-thatched barracks housed the local help.

At Abu Hadriya (‘Father of Slopes’) the ‘Arab Zone’, the Jurassic limestone being successfully exploited at Dammam, was filled with brine so saturated with chlorides that it used up all the fluid in my kit for determining salinity. Late in the summer of 1939 it was decided that the rig would be shut down, so I left for Dhahran. But the tool pusher had several ‘stands’ (each stand comprising three thirty-foot connected joints) of drill pipe stacked in the derrick. He wanted to use them so he stopped communicating by radio and continued drilling. Before the last stand was used, oil appeared in the mud. It was another porous limestone reservoir at 10,200 feet, the Hadriya zone, its existence previously unsuspected.

My ‘Lab’ was in a corner of the ‘hotel’, with a microscope on a card table next to a concrete sink with the usual sieves and sample dishes. Late in April, hot weather arrived. I worked at the microscope, torso bare, with towels wrapped around my arms to keep sweat from dampening the paper on which I wrote descriptions of the samples and plotted a log of them on a strip of cross-section paper. In the inverted V-roofed, high-ceilinged room, sleep was just possible at night.

I tell several stories about my time at Abu Hadriya. Two have to do with wild animals, two with my own lingering childishness, and a fifth about a case of madness. In addition to the Steineke hotel there was a ‘clubhouse’ of sorts with several easy chairs and a collection of books and magazines, as well as a short-wave radio receiver. In the clubhouse was a pet ‘gumfit,’ a hedgehog. When someone attempted to hold the small beast (who would have been cuddly if spines had not covered his back) he curled up, his soft furry belly and his tiny snout and beady eyes hidden under the spines. One hot evening I fell asleep in one of the easy chairs in the clubhouse, my left arm dangling at my side. I awoke with a shout because of a sharp pain in one finger. The gumfit had mistaken it for a worm or at least something edible and fastened his sharp teeth into it. Involuntarily, I jerked my arm up and the small beast hurtled across the room. He did not appear to have suffered permanent damage, for he was still living in the clubhouse when I left.

George Maybee was the automobile mechanic at the rig with a penchant for pets. His were odd. One was a young ‘theeb,’ a desert wolf who trusted nobody and showed it by a sneer that curled his lips away from his teeth. The other was a lizard, not the ’thub’ — broad and low-slung, whose tail was an Arab delicacy — but the other slender beast with a crest on the spine. This one was held captive by a rope around its neck, its blackish-green body and tail more than two feet long. I nudged the reptile with my foot. Suddenly an oval piece of the toe of my boot was gone. Fortunately, the boots were a little too big, or a chunk of toe would have added savor to the dry leather.

In April and May the shamal, a wind from the northwest, blew without let-up for days at a time. As the well was not drilling ahead, I decided to take advantage of the free time to build a kite. I made it five-feet tall of heavy wrapping paper and bamboo canes and flew it with a heavy cord and a twenty-foot rope tail. The long tail was necessary to maintain stability in the strong, unceasing wind. I finally tied the ‘string’ to one of the corner posts of the rig. I believe the kite was in the air for a week before it came down.

I was young and devil-may-care when my work was not in question. When the tests of the Arab zone were under way I tossed lighted matches into the briny water-filled drill-pipe to ignite the gas which bubbled out. The driller may have thought it part of normal procedure for he did not stop me. We could both have been burned to death had gas been more abundant.

Whenever drilling stopped for several days, I returned to Dhahran where I slept cool and could talk to fellow geologists. Max had given me his black Ford sedan, which because of his rank had been well maintained. I made the hundred plus-mile trip over sand and sabkha in two hours and twenty minutes, raising the window when the sweat on my face dried in the burning wind and opening it when I was again covered with perspiration. The Arab mail driver made it in two hours flat. But he trusted Allah. Nevertheless my driving caused much comment.

Not long after I began my stint at Abu Hadriya a survey party arrived. Its task was to fix the limits of the ‘Neutral Zone’, a diamond-shaped tract on the Iraq-Saudi-Arab frontier that had been established in 1921 at the Oqair conference when Sir Percy Cox had drawn lines on a map to mark the frontiers between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait, marking-out two ‘Neutral Zones’ as a sop to Sultan Ibn Saud’s contention that tribes of the three states must have equal rights in areas near the line of the border. The Sultan had strongly opposed the notion of a fixed linear boundary.

The party of five or six was under Dick Hatrup, a surveyor. It returned in two weeks. One of the members was strangely silent. He would not talk when I tried to find out how the survey had progressed and later lay motionless on a cot in the ‘hotel.’ I learned that mail he awaited anxiously had not come, and that he snapped under the strain. The next day he was returned to Dhahran in a strait-jacket and later was sent by air to the states.

After Abu Hadriya shut down, I divided my time between boning up on the sequence of older strata in the Dammam wells and, aided by Fred Waldron, in supervising more structure drilling. We now had three of the small rigs in the field. With Waldron and me were drillers Ed Woodbury, ‘Benny’ Bennett and Charlie Lane. I was very busy surveying rig sites and working with Waldron to examine the results of the drilling. However, one of us could spend several days a month in Dhahran running samples, for in the area now being explored, ‘Mutba,’ (the kitchen) drilling was slowed by loss of circulation and stuck pipe.

Pulling a Core

When Abqaiq No.1 finally spudded early in February 1940, I was selected to ‘sit’ it. The sequence of strata below the Eocene was in general similar, although somewhat thicker than that found on Dammam Dome where the initial discovery, Dammam No.7, had been made in 1938, six months before the arrival of our party. However, a transgressive, fine-grained limestone of medial Cretaceous age was considerably thinner. The unit under this limestone, a 60-foot green shale at Dammam, was a great mass of interbedded sandstone and shale. When I continued to report sand after the drill had penetrated several hundred feet of these clastics, Dick came himself to ‘sit’ the well, for if the thickening persisted throughout the remaining section, closure could be wiped out. Too, he feared that slumping sand masked the true nature of the beds penetrated. Fortunately, under it the rest of the strata were like those at Dammam, but the producing levels were much thicker, so that the quantity of oil in place per unit of area was tripled or quadrupled. When many wells had been completed on the structure, closure on the reservoir beds was found to be over three thousand feet.

Georgia Sander - 1947 in Ras Tanura

Abqaiq No.1 proved the existence of a large reservoir in biostromal fore-reef limestones capped by impermeable anhydrite. Its true dimensions would not become known for more than a year after my return to Arabia in October 1946. My wife joined me in February 1947. Before her arrival I lived at the camp that had been set up at Abqaiq. There, I ‘sat’ the wells drilled to produce the oil. Engineers had decided to site development wells in a long oval around the crest, and when I began work again, numbers 6, 7, 8 and 9 were under way. Wells 2, 3, and 4 had been completed during the war years under great difficulties of transport and shortage of equipment. A promised laboratory trailer had not yet arrived, so I worked in a bedroom of the bunkhouse, washing the mud from cuttings, sieving them in water from a hose above a fifty-five gallon drum, and examining them with a new binocular microscope on a card table. After washing a series of samples I dried my hands on a towel which I then hung out the window to dry.

One hot afternoon the towel disappeared with a swoosh. I ran to the door of the bunkhouse and saw a night-gowned figure running along the building. By the time I started my pickup and went after him he was well into the desert, but was no match for the speed of the car. I made him get in with his booty and returned to the camp. At that time the soldier guards ordered by the king numbered about twenty. I reported what had happened. At once my captive was ordered to lie spread-eagled on the ground and a broad palm stave was applied unmercifully. He made no outcry but I decided not to report minor thievery. Seven years later when we lived in Dhahran the houseboys stole a sweater knitted by my wife, whisky, cigarettes, socks, and sheets. These losses were not mentioned, for we had seen the severed hands on the fence near the main gate to the camp, the prescribed punishment for theft.

I went to each rig twice a day to collect samples, each theoretically representing a part of the debris of five feet of rock. At first, fistfuls of cuttings were taken from the shaker (a coarse screen several square feet in area made to vibrate by an electric motor) through which the mud pumped from the bottom of the hole passed. Later I designed an apron of sheet metal with a moveable bar that deflected a portion of the cuttings into a trough. In this way, I had a sample truly representative of the rock drilled through. Each of the small canvas sacks of cuttings was labeled in indelible pencil with the well number, and the depths it was supposed to represent. I say ‘supposed’ for mud containing the debris from a given interval took a length of time to reach the shaker that depended on the volume per minute of mud moved by the pumps, the diameter of the drill pipe, and the area of the annulus, (the space between the outside of the drill pipe and the circumference of the hole made by the bit, or the interior of the steel pipe, ‘casing,’ that protected a portion of the walls of the hole). These were different in every well and were complicated by the sloughing of soft rock from the wall of the hole that increased its diameter incalculably.

I made tables giving the theoretical values of any combination of factors and posted them in the ‘doghouse’, the shelter on the rig floor for the driller and roustabouts. But when more precision in ‘return time’ was desired, as in a wildcat, the practical solution was to put an identifiable material in the mud before another joint of drill pipe was added to the string. This material was usually dried beans, but fluorescent dye gave a more accurate measure of the time required for the marker to reappear at the shaker. When additional men arrived to take over the routine of well-site work at Abqaiq, I was made supervisor of geological operations on wildcats. But again I am far ahead of my story for that was in March 1947.

The En Nala Anticline

In 1940 I returned to structure-drilling almost full time, with Fred Waldron as my assistant. The Mutba structure turned out to be rather small and doubtful, but was the site of an amusing incident. The Zoll brothers, both somewhat dictatorial, were on charge of the camp sited in an area of loose sand. The tent stakes were long, ribbed iron rods with a hook-like head. One stormy night with high wind and a little rain, a stake on one tent pulled loose. It flailed the air, a danger to everyone. While I was getting it under control, Dud Zoll said, ‘I’d better put the radio on the floor.’ It was in the recreation tent, somewhat larger than the sleeping ones. If the tent had fallen, the radio would have been out of commission. I said, ‘Be careful, Dud! Static electricity!’ He paid no attention. That afternoon I had amused myself making holes in paper with the four inch spark from the end of the antenna that for safety I had detached from the set with insulated pliers. When putting it back to make the evening broadcast I had a hefty shock. I heard an anguished yipe. Dud had put his arms around the set and taken a jolt in his midsection. After that he left the radio to me, even asking me to transmit his requests for food and supplies.

Structure Drill Used in the Fifties

May, we moved the three rigs farther south and west. I note in my diary for 27 May 1940, ‘We moved camp south fifty kilometers to Jebel Abu Merika. Have found indications of what may be a much better structure.’ I was right. On 28 August my note, written after a month’s vacation in India, ‘After moving camp south we drilled wells up to S-99. Found a lot of closure but have not proved any to the south yet.’ (sic. Technically, this was not true; I should have said, reversal to the south.) We were on the track of a tremendous feature, already followed for more than 100 miles. In that same note, I write, ‘Am working on Abqaiq samples. Well is down 2400 feet and is 1000 feet higher than El Alat.’ Later I was sent to Abqaiq to ‘sit’ the wildcat. I was relieved, as noted above, by Bramkamp himself when the clastic unit under the Aptian transgressive limestone proved to be a great deal thicker than its shale equivalent at Dammam. I then went back to delineating the great feature that was still being traced southward.

A third geologist joined us, but didn’t stay long. We were relieved of the chore of determining the elevation of each well because the gravity meter crew with their Wye levels determined their height above sea level much more accurately than we could with plane table and alidade.

We continued south with wells across the axis of the anticline, now christened En Nala, the rows, each of three or four holes, spaced at twenty or more kilometers from each other. The routine of mapping structure was now well established. We had a mechanic for the vehicles, and soon a trailer appeared, cooled by evaporation of water blown over straw, and provided with a sink and sieves to wash the samples that were now collected by a small catcher under the lip of the surface pipe set at each well. The problem of lost circulation, common over the axis of the anticline, was resolved in critical situations by using a cable tool rig run by an old timer who stood for hours judging by the feel of the cable in his hand the progress of the heavy, wedge-shaped bit that literally pounded its way through the rock, actuated by the up-and-down motion of the wooden walking beam. The samples were obtained with a bailer on a small cable. They were commonly much finer in texture but less contaminated than those from rotary bits.

I have recorded two short anecdotes concerning events that I experienced at this time. One took place during the early stages of the long campaign to find reversal on this structure, ever-rising southward. I was sitting in a camp chair, peering through a microscope on a box. The samples had been washed free of mud in a 55-gallon drum. Flies were trying to suck moisture from my eyes, but were hindered by my metal-rimmed spectacles. Both bare arms were black with these pests. I was protected from the broiling sun by a beach umbrella.

The water for drilling had come from a pond formed in a depression after the unusually heavy rains of that winter. Our water truck filled from it for several weeks because it obviated long round trips to a well already drilled. But as the torrential downpour which formed that pond began, one of the drillers was driving up a canyon to reach a mesa where a track led to camp. His pickup was buried in mud, and he staggered into camp at 4 AM.

In the round, black rubber sample dish I was astounded to see movement. Under magnification it was a tiny ostracod, its legs beating frantically. Visible through its transparent valves was a bright red stalk bearing minute eggs, the most striking feature of this interloper. Later I saw many of its fellows in my samples, not all with egg stalks.

I pondered the fecundity of nature. Here was an aquatic animal busy reproducing itself in a desert where water formed ponds perhaps once in ten years. Yet the eggs of this small crustacean had waited through years of drought, and then had hatched and come to maturity in a few days when water called. How many years would the eggs of the new generation await the same? And how had this adaptation to desert conditions come about? In the Rub’ al Khali twelve years later I found a possible explanation. There, lakes and rivers had existed for some thousands of years during the Pleistocene epoch, when glaciers covered northern Europe. Perhaps as the ice sheets retreated and returned, retreated and returned, the climatic changes in Arabia were so marked that only small crustaceans with eggs capable of withstanding longer and longer periods of desiccation could survive. Clams and snails of that epoch have left only their limy shells as testimony to the existence of ‘permanent’ streams and standing water.

After this moment of thought I glanced down. There in an inch-wide column marching toward me were hundreds of ticks. Many camels were in the area, but nature was again making sure of the survival of her own by multiplying numbers. I avoided the attack by moving my chair, but had to repeat the maneuver several times that day as the ticks were aware through some sense that an animal with red blood had changed its location. Ticks were a nuisance, but not the plague that locusts were.

During the later stages of the mapping of the En Nala anticline, crawling locusts covered square miles of terrain. Crawling or flying, every bush and tree was denuded. Their hordes covered the sky. Our main problem with them was the difficulty of travel when they were flying in large numbers. They covered windshields with stinking yellow and green goo and clogged radiators, as well as cutting visibility. But some of our drilling crews collected gunny sacks full, for they ate them, shucking the wings and heads like peanut shells.

I decided to sample them. Saeed, the cook, was a small Adenese. I told him, ‘Fry me a dozen for breakfast. Use butter, not ghi.’ ( clarified sheep fat) The next morning I was duly served tiny corpses on a plate. One of the drillers, a new one and a stout loudmouth, asked me what I was eating. I answered, ‘Grasshoppers.’ I am fairly sure that my answer was not the real reason for his sudden departure, but he said, ‘I’ll be G— D——, if I’ll stay in a place where they eat grasshoppers!’ and he did leave the camp near Ain Haradh and return to Dhahran. To me the pitiful abdominal segments tasted like sawdust. Maybe they were better uncooked, but I never found out.

There were millions or billions of these insects, but they were less ubiquitous than the universal tormentor, the fly. Perhaps not more hazardous to health but much more painful when they attacked were the arachnids — scorpions. Every seasoned camper shook his boots before putting them on. There were big black ones and small green ones. One Christmas time I volunteered to stay alone in the camp near the town of Hofuf. Grateful for the respite from being at a rig early in the morning, I was dozing on my bed when I heard a rustle on the green-dyed matting of the floor. A big black scorpion, tail high, was approaching my haven. I pulled the blankets from its path and reached for a boot. The satisfaction I felt when it was squashed was a high point of that day.

Years later, on a trip to the interior along the front of Jebel Tuwaiq, I saw a scorpion killer. Unfortunately, it did not live in Al Hasa. Later I saw the same beast preserved in a jar of alcohol in Brussels. It too was an arachnid, I believe, or at least a kind of arthropod. It was not a ‘vinegaroon,’ but we called it that. About the size of a large scorpion, it had no sting, but was provided with two long arms that projected far forward of its head, each provided with a small scissors at the end. When put near a scorpion it snipped off the sting, then ate most of the suddenly defenseless enemy.

Another interesting insect, beneficial in more than one sense, was a beetle: the big, black, sacred scarab of ancient Egypt. Had there been more of them, flies would have been fewer. As everyone knows the scarabs lay their eggs in dung. One day on the sand dunes at Abqaiq I felt a call of nature. Before evacuation had been completed I heard a whirring and a beetle dropped from the air a foot or more above the loose sand of the dune. No sooner had it regained its six feet than it headed toward its target. I decided to watch what happened and glanced at my wristwatch. In five minutes eight beetles had found the prize, and some had already formed a ball of plunder with their front pair of legs and had begun to push it away with the back ones. I followed one of them. The sand of the dune was not compacted, but the beetle left its new possession and began to dig. Somehow, the walls of the burrow held together and before long the ball was pushed into it and covered. Back at the mine the ministrations of more beetles caused all of the ore to disappear in less than thirty-five minutes.

Back to ticks. All of the camp dogs had them, and it was a daily chore to remove them. We were told the best way to do it was to hold a lighted cigarette near the head until it was withdrawn from the hide. But bloated bodies full of blood were not only disgusting but had a tendency to burst from the heat of the cigarette end.

One of those dogs came to regard me as his master. It was Big’Un, a hound much bigger than most, vaguely like a light-colored Chesapeake Bay retriever, but approaching a mastiff in size. He had been raised from a puppy by the seismic survey crew, fed everything a dog could hope for, and had grown accordingly. When the crew went home he attached himself to the George Maybee who at Abu Hadriya had had odd pets, but was later the mechanic for the crew, and after its departure assigned to look after our vehicles. But George had to stay in camp while I went daily to the rigs. Big’Un liked to ride and to chivvy the lean hounds of the infrequently encountered groupings of the black tents. He would jump from the open window of the pickup, race through the campsite and return to me. I had to stop and open the door so he could regain his place on the seat. After a while he no longer slept in front of George’s tent but guarded mine. In June 1941, when I left Dhahran on home leave it was with a guilty feeling. What would happen to Big’Un? When I returned five years later no one had heard of him.

We continued the routine of drilling profiles across the structure each distant twenty or more kilometers from the preceding one. Our findings showed a continual rise in the elevation of our markers. I knew that something had to happen eventually, but would the anticlinal fold be cut off by a cross-fault, as the existence of an ancient west-east river channel, Wadi Sahaba, suggested, or would the plunge reverse itself?

I was ‘sitting’ a shallow drilling well near the ancient stone-faced rim of Ain Haradh on the east flank of the anticline when Max and Dick appeared. They had been examining outcrops over the axis. Dick handed me a piece of gray soft marl. ‘What is it?’ he asked. I wet it and put it in a sample dish under the scope. I had seen its like many times before, a white, friable, chalky limestone. ‘ It's the Chalky Zone,’ I replied. So this marker, found many hundreds of feet underground farther north was now cropping out, weathered to a marl. It was not a good omen, for Wadi Sahaba was less than thirty miles to the south.

We moved camp more or less to the site of Dick’s find. About twenty kilometers south of it I ran in the location of S-108 with odometer and compass using alidade and plane table to determine elevation. The gravity meter crews always found my work to be in error, once by as much as a hundred feet in height above sea level, but they were not yet operating here. Fortunately, a second order triangulation station had been established not far from the well site. I ran my traverse twice and was fairly confident of its accuracy. The rig came on site and drilling began. It was at once obvious that markers above the ‘Chalky Zone’ were present, but their validity in proving a reversal in plunge depended on the accuracy of my calculation of the elevation of the well-site. The hole was completed late one afternoon. I had seen a slight but measurable increase in the thickness of the section between markers as compared to those in a well sited on the presumed axis of the anticline 40 kilometers farther north.

I was nearly enough certain of my observations to risk my neck. That night at the time of our 7 PM contact by radio with Dhahran, I reported at the end of a string of similar words, ‘Fox, brown, red, white’ meaning Lockhartia ‘8’ at 365 feet. The code was changed weekly. The elevation had been sent in previously, so Dick would know at once that a reversal in plunge had been found. Before the end of my report, Charlie Homewood, the radio man, broke in, ‘Drop everything. Everybody back to camp tonight!’ This was a five-hour ride, but the moon was full. We scarcely needed our blued-out headlights. They were only one of several reminders that a great war was going on. Mail was delayed because of British censorship, and supplies of fresh fruit and vegetables had almost dried up, but field parties were given the best of what was available.

It was after 2 AM on the nineteenth of October when I fell into bed in the room of the cottage that I shared with Tom Barger. He was in the field then, as he was most of the time, so I was alone. I slept well, got up late and went to the lab. I noticed an unusual quiet during my ten-minute walk but ascribed it to some Arab holiday. As I was going into the small office, I saw coming down the craggy hill that closed off the street an Arab with a burden on each shoulder. As he came nearer me he shouted, ‘Shoof, Sahib, Shoof!’ I ‘shoofed’ and as I ran yelled, ‘Imshi, Roh!’ The burden on each shoulder, held precariously in place by a hand, was a small finned bomb. The reason for the call to hurry in became obvious.

During the night Italian bombers, flying all the long way from Eritrea, (or perhaps from the island of Rhodes) had dropped a number of those small bombs on Dhahran and on Awali in Bahrain. Their aiming points were the flares of gas burned as oil was produced. I learned later that during the previous week our flares, sited on the jebel near the office, had been moved several hundred feet. In any event, the total damage in Dhahran was two small oil lines cut. I believe it was not much more in Bahrain. It seems clear that management had had forewarning. According to several sources, the attack on Dhahran by only one plane was pilot error. The target assigned was the British-controlled refinery on Bahrain.

Although damage was slight the bombing changed the course of company policy. Those due for leave were urged to take it and others were sent home early. Plans for exploration and development were for the most part shelved. As new equipment and supplies were unobtainable it was a wise decision then but was regretted later.