DHAHRAN: You are deep inside the field of dreams watching tendrils of bright green snaking through the red world that envelopes you, while small black balls rush through tubes leading up to the surface 7,000 feet above your head. A psychedelic dream? A scene from a science-fiction movie? Neither of these. Welcome to the Geosteering Operations Center (GOC) at the headquarters of Saudi Aramco in Dhahran in the Kingdom’s eastern province.
The “field of dreams” — so described by American oil geologists when it was found in the 1940s — is Ghawar, the largest onshore oil field in the world; the green fingers are the multi-branch drill lines that reach out for each available drop of oil; the black balls represent nano-molecules of advanced ingredients to ease the flow of crude to the desert well-heads.
Aramco’s state-of-the-art technology allows you, via a virtual reality headset, to look deep inside the well that supplies something like half of the 9.9 million barrels of crude the Kingdom produces every day.
You are able to experience what it’s like deep inside an oil well thanks mainly to two bits of tech — geosteering and billion cell simulation — that enable the technicians and engineers who man the center to keep the wells running at optimum efficiency and to exploit every last barrel of the Kingdom’s most precious resource.
These workers refer to themselves as “Aramcons,” and all around Aramco HQ is evidence of the central role they have played in the country’s economic development since oil was discovered at Dammam well number 7 some 80 years ago.
The “Prosperity Well” that first produced oil in 1938 is memorialized nearby; there are old derricks that still look usable on the slopes of Dammam Dome; and the longer-serving Aramcons offer the opinion that there are still significant amounts of crude beneath our feet.
Whether it will ever be pumped again — when Saudi Arabia has the biggest and most productive fields in the world elsewhere in the Kingdom — is another matter.
But in 2018 Aramco is looking to ensure future prosperity by getting away from the old image as a mere pumper of crude. These days, as a look around Dhahran makes clear, the company wants to rank itself among the hi-tech industrial giants of the digital age, using its huge resources in oil and gas for much more than simply burning in car engines.
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