Left top: A July 25, 1948, lab report strongly indicated the presenceof hydrocarbons at ‘Ain Dar. Left middle: A June 12, 1951, flow-test reporton Ghawar’s first well, at ‘Ain Dar, was very promising. Left bottom:Legendary Bedouin guide Khamis bin Rimthan was instrumentalin guiding Aramco geologists to potential well sites throughoutthe Eastern Province. Above: a map showing the location of Ghawar“discovery” wells west of the Arabian Gulf.
Expo 2010, Shanghai
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62-year-old super-giant Ghawaroil field as productive as ever
Written by Brett Fischbuch and Tom Keith
The debut discoveries, following the signing of anexploration concession agreement between Saudi Arabiaand Standard Oil Of California (Socal) in 1933, wereat Dammam (1938), Abu Hadriyah (March 1940) andAbqaiq (December 1940).These successes led in less thana decade to the astounding real-ization that a number of appar-ently independent, commerciallyviable oil fields were, in fact, allpart of one mind-bending mega-field — Ghawar.Ghawar is divided into fiveareas, discovered individually:’Ain Dar (1948), Haradh (1949— located in the southernmostpart of the field), ‘Uthmaniyah(1951), Shedgum (1952) andHawiyah (1953).The giant reservoir is 280 kilo-meters long and 40 km wide,encompassing 1.3 million acres.Saudi Aramco continues topump about 5 million barrelsof Arabian Light crude oil fromGhawar reservoirs every day. Italso pumps 2.5 billion cubic feetper day (cfd) of natural gas fromthe field in association with theproduction of oil, and another 4billion cfd of non-associated gas,produced from independent gasreservoirs beneath but not part of Ghawar’s oil-bearing formations.So, by all measures, Ghawar— the “crown jewel” for SaudiAramco and the Kingdom —is an awesome asset.Ghawar has all the right stuff to be a super producer: high po-rosity of its reservoir rock, whichmeans there’s an abundance of rock pores, or spaces, for holding oil; high permeabil-ity, meaning many natural channels allowing oil to flowthrough the rock; valuable light rather than heavy oil; andhigh recovery potential.The original realization of Ghawar’s existence wasa kind of educated hunch.In 1940, while the Abqaiqprospect was being drilled, ayoung geologist — Ernie Berg— was spending his second fieldseason mapping adjacent quad-rangles on the edge of the greatRub‘ Al-Khali desert, or “EmptyQuarter.” Berg mapped the dryriver bed known as Wadi Sahabain the Haradh area and noticedthat it took a sharp turn to thesouth from its normal east-westcourse for no reason apparent tothe naked eye.After measuring and plot-ting a large enough area to seea trend, it became apparentthat the wadi was diverted bya broad, low-relief dome, thesurface expression of a muchlarger subsurface dome or an-ticline. Aramco geologist MaxSteineke, who was the drivingforce behind the company’s firstcommercial discovery two yearsearlier at Well No. 7 in Dam-mam, came into camp the nextday and agreed with Berg thatthe Haradh structure was poten-tially significant.In fact, it turned out thatBerg’s map was the first to delin-eate a structure in the Ghawarfield and was therefore whatgeologists would call the “dis-covery map” for that field. With
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