Day 1: Dammam #7

We got about 1.5 hours of sleep thanks to jet lag and the local wake up call from the mosques at 4:30 am. Sounded like hundreds of them going off simultaneously. 

We had to catch the bus and make it to the Reunion House in camp by 8:15 because a large number of attendees did not have IDs prepared.  There was a mad scramble to get everyone equipped with an ID in time to catch their buses to their selected morning activities.  Of course, none of the buses left on time.

Monday morning we spent touring the core area office buildings. In the EXPEC Center, we toured two theater-style collaboration rooms where cross-disciplinary teams work on projects: the Event Resolution and Geo-steering centers. The Geo-steering center allows visualization, integration and analysis of real-time well data to direct drilling activity.

Next was a trip to the Dammam #7 well, the well that almost wasn’t.  For the unwashed, read here: The Seven Wells of Dammam.  Growing up, our night sky was always a pinkish color from the flares on top of the Dammam Dome.  The flares were done away with long before Saudi Aramco finally shut in the well just a few years ago.  We also visited the nearby Saudi Aramco Oil Exhibit which has lots of interactive displays about everything from oil formation to refining and tankers.  Unfortunately, quite a few were not functioning properly, including the one demonstrating the seismic method (geophone stuck in a slab of stone and wired to an oscilloscope).  I beat the crap out of the rock and barely got a blip a couple of times.  Boo!  Hiss!

Last stop of the day was the Aramco Heritage Gallery, a local museum dedicated to the Aramco communities’ history.  It’s a lot of fun to see how the camps have changed over time.  The exhibit also included a structural map of the Dammam Dome and wells, including the triangulations that the field geologists had done.  Would love to have a print of that!

We both nearly passed out from lack of sleep and jet lag on the bus back to Khobar, so we made dinner a quick one -- Chili’s, if you can believe it.  We passed on the Firecracker Hammour and ordered cheeseburgers.

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