The Aramco compound – where most of the work is done to keep the Saudi oil machine turning – is still situated in the exact same area where the story of oil began for Saudi Arabia 86 years ago. I was lucky enough to get a glimpse of the properly secured compound earlier this year when I attended the IPTC conference and a friend was so kind to show me his house.
“Once in, you don’t feel like being in a secured area”, my friend told me before we were picked up from Al Khobar where we enjoyed a nice meal and wandered around the big coastline projects that so clearly define the new ambitions of the country’s ruler, Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud or MBS.
The outer ring of the compound consists of the Aramco office blocks, and the inner circle is where employees live. We did not visit the offices but continued towards the centre of the compound.
Once in the residential areas, what is very apparent is the typical American style of housing. If unaware, one would surely think that this would have been a housing estate in one of America’s early suburbs. Lawns nicely cut, American cars sitting on drives, STOP signs at every crossing, and the typical bungalow-style houses.
And that is not a surprise, as it was the Americans who not only found the oil in the first place, but then also helped build the infrastructure to start exploiting it. Aramco stands for Arabic and American oil company.
The compound residents have little to complain about in this unique place in the desert. A golf course, perfectly maintained parks, schools, gyms, everything is catered for here. “I don’t often leave the compound”, my friend admitted. “I don’t feel like being locked up at all.”
On our way back out – I stayed in a normal hotel in town – we passed the place where the first oil discovery was made in Dammam. It is still within the perimeter of the compound – something that I had not foreseen when looking up the place on Google Maps. Dammam-7 was the seventh well in a row that finally found commercial quantities of oil in the Dammam dome – the previous wells had all TD’d at shallower depths and had only resulted in shows or rapidly declining production tests.
And behind the little monument, there are work yards and well heads visible, all clearly demonstrating the continuous activity in the area that all focused on one thing: getting more out from those fields that kickstarted Saudi’s oil bonanza 86 years ago.
