The anniversary of the discovery of offshore oil
▶ James Langton tells the inspiring story of events leading to March 28, 1958, when a bucket of crude was pulled from the sea
Dusk has arrived on March 28, 1958 and the Sun is sinking into the Arabian Gulf. An orange glow catches the drilling tower of the Adma Enterprise, the strangest creature these waters have ever seen.
It is an offshore exploration platform, the first of its kind. The four hydraulic legs sit on a seabed of coral on the same spot where, five years earlier, the French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau had retrieved rock samples that showed this might be the place.
The Enterprise, built in Germany and hauled by tug across four seas and 12,000 kilometres, has one purpose – to find oil. For each of the 77 days the routine has been the same. The drill is extended pipe by pipe, grinding hour by hour, deeper and deeper towards the strata in which Cousteau’s rocks suggest oil might be found.
Tonight, as it has been every evening since January 10, the job is to shut down the operation until dawn. In working hours, a milky lubricant of mud and water is used to grease and cool the drill as it turned in its narrow vertical tunnel of rock. The lubricant also washes up samples of rock so they can be examined for signs of oil.
As the samples are recovered, the cloudy liquid gushes across the decks of the rig to be washed overboard. From there it settles on the seabed.
It is a mundane task made less so by the natural beauty of the surroundings. These waters of the Gulf are filled with millions of tiny organisms that glow at night, igniting the waves with a cold, white fire. It is a spectacular sight.
A young Englishman named Mike Pennock is supervising the work this evening. As he watches the pale flickers of phosphorescence he notices something strange. One patch of the sea just beneath the rig remains dark.
It is the area where the drilling lubricant has been flushed from the deck.
A growing suspicion enters Pennock’s mind. A bucket is attached to rope and lowered into the dark waters. It tips on the surface, then sinks and fills and is hauled back to the deck of the Enterprise.
Pennock dips his hand into the bucket. The surface of the water feels thick and slightly sticky. It is not water at all, he realises. It is crude oil.
At that moment, as night falls, a seismic force – for now unnoticed and unseen except by one young man – reverberates across the landscape.
Abu Dhabi has entered the age of oil and nothing will ever be the same again.
A promise of black gold
Oil propelled the ambitions of the great powers at the dawn of the 20th century. It fuelled the machines of industry, the growing fleets of cars and the early aircraft. The demand was tremendous and seemingly insatiable.
In 1911, the new First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made a momentous decision about Britain’s Imperial Fleet. From now on, the world’s mightiest warships would be powered not by coal, but by oil.
There was only one problem. Neither Britain, nor any of the other European rival powers had oil of their own. Reserves had to be found quickly and then closely guarded.
Britain was particularly well placed for this black gold rush. In 1908, British businessman William Knox D’Arcy became the first to strike oil in the Middle East, in what is now Iran.
Two years later, Darcy’s Burmah Oil had been nationalised by the British government, laying the foundations for the company now known as BP.
In October 1927 more oil was found, in what is now modern day Iraq, then another British sphere of influence in the Arabian Gulf after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Year by year the black tide crept south. In 1932 discoveries were made in Bahrain, and Kuwait in 1938.
The first of Saudi Arabia’s massive reserves was found that same year. In May 1940, as the Second World War brought an even more desperate hunger for oil, it was Qatar’s turn.
Wherever it was found, oil transformed lives. It made vast fortunes for a few, but also brought jobs and prosperity to many. Shops filled with exotic imported goods and the streets with cars. The new oil capitals of the Middle East became a magnet for investors and anyone looking for work. It was the future.
But what of Abu Dhabi? During the 1930s, a series of exploration deals had been struck with the rulers of the emirates that would later form the UAE. The Ruler of Abu Dhabi, Sheikh Shakhbut bin Sultan Al Nahyan, held out the longest, eventually reaching a deal in January 1939 after five years of tough negotiations with the British companies.
The stakes were high. Across the region, the Japanese discovery of cheap, mass-produced cultured pearls in 1928 soon wreaked
havoc with the economies of the Arabian Gulf. Pearl diving fell into catastrophic decline, made worse by the global economic slump of the Great Depression that further hit demand for luxury goods.
In such times, even the prospect of oil was enough to offer hope of a better future. The deal signed by Abu Dhabi in January 1939 promised a yearly bounty in silver coins of 100,000 Indian rupees, worth about Dh6.2 million in today’s currency, and with a penalty clause of 25 per cent extra for every year that drilling was delayed.
The promise was there for improved lives and even some immediate material benefits, such as the massive expansion of Qasr Al Hosn to the structure that is familiar today.
But the year in which Abu Dhabi signed its oil concession is better remembered now as the start of the Second World War. Any thoughts that exploration might begin were abandoned as the fighting began in Europe, then soon spread to the Middle East and beyond.
The Arabian Gulf might be spared from conflict but it was not immune from the consequences. For the next seven years, Abu Dhabi would have to fend for itself.
A new hope
The end of the Second World War in 1945 did not immediately bring a resumption of oil exploration in Abu Dhabi. But important changes, legal and technological, changed the scope of what might be achieved.
Nations were increasingly claiming the right to explore and exploit oil and gas under the seabed off their coasts, a quest made possible with the development of drilling rigs that could be moored offshore.
Abu Dhabi declared that the existing oil concession did not cover offshore exploration and was able to sell these rights.
By 1952 the offshore concession had passed to a new venture, created by British Petroleum with a French company, Compagnie Francaise des Petroles (now Total), as a minority partner. The new partnership would be called Abu Dhabi Marine Areas.
The deal agreed to was that Adma would hold the concession for 65 years but had to begin drilling for oil within five years, or by 1958. The clock was now ticking.
Finding the right location was the first task. In 1949 a young officer had left the French navy to set up his own research company, using an underwater breathing apparatus called an aqua-lung, which he had helped to develop.
Jacques Cousteau, who would later find fame with his Silent
World TV series, leased a former British Royal Navy minesweeper, now a Maltese ferry, for a token one French franc a year. He renamed his new floating base Calypso.
Cousteau and Calypso sailed to the Arabian Gulf in early 1954, hired by Adma for 10 weeks of exploration in which divers would retrieve rock samples from the seabed for scientific analysis.
Further investigation by a seismic survey ship, Sonic, had confirmed the potential for undersea oil.
Things were also moving ahead on land. The centre of operations lay to the north-west, across the Arabian Gulf. Das Island was more than 100km from the coast of Abu Dhabi and was under the authority of the Nahyan family, through a representative known as a wali, or custodian, appointed by the Ruler.
Inhabited only by seabirds and the millions of flies that fed off their droppings, Das was devoid of vegetation, broiling in summer and lashed by storms in winter. But it was ideal as a base for the projected drilling sites.
Men and machines arrived in increasing numbers, shipped in on landing craft from Bahrain. Bulldozers put the seabirds to flight. Insecticide dealt with the flies but perhaps not as completely as the workforce would have liked.
Hills were levelled and their rocks used to build a harbour breakwater. A landing strip was built, big enough for the chartered twin-engine De Havilland Dove from Gulf Aviation. The workforce, drawn largely from the UK and the Indian subcontinent but also the local population, toiled and sweltered to meet a fast-approaching deadline.
Thousands of miles away to the north, another group of workers was rising to the challenge.
Voyage of the Enterprise
Extracting oil under the sea had been tried with varying degrees of success since the 1920s. The modern oil platform was based on engineering technology developed in the Second World War, when Britain built powerful floating forts on steel legs and fixed them to the seabed off the coast.
It was now possible to drill out of sight of land, something tried for the first time in the Gulf of Mexico in 1946. It was an ideal solution for Abu Dhabi’s offshore oil concession. But there were serious problems.
The nearest shipyards with the technology to build such a platform were on the other side of the world. Once built, the rig would have to be towed thousands of miles through seas notorious for stormy conditions.
It would ideally pass through the Suez Canal – except that it was closed in 1956, blocked by sunken ships after the Suez conflict triggered by Britain and France.
Finally, it would have to be steered into the tiny harbour at Das to be prepared for operations.
Adma pressed on. British shipyards, put off by the complexity of the project, declined to build it. But a German yard desperate for work after the war agreed to take on the challenge.
So it was that the Adma Enterprise was built on the banks of the Kiel Canal, designed by American engineers with British equipment and German skilled labour. Work at the Gutehoffnungshuette yard began in early 1956.
It was the strangest craft ever seen; a huge rectangular box of steel overshadowed by four columns and a tower.
Costing the equivalent of Dh60 million, it had four retractable legs 50 metres long and was capable of operating in water up to 25 metres deep. It floated, 60 metres long and 30 wide, with a draft of 3 metres. Once in position, the legs were lowered to the seabed at 5 centimetres a minute.
By now it was late summer in 1957 and the challenge was to bring the Adma Enterprise from the North Sea and the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf.
There was good news. With help from the UN, Egypt was able to clear the Suez in April that year.
The ocean-going tug Thames, with a Dutch crew, had the towing ropes attached and the rig entered the North Sea from the western end of the canal, then moved down the coast of Northern Europe and through the English Channel.
Summer storms battered the vessel in the Bay of Biscay off the coast of Spain and Portugal, but after a month the Enterprise and
Thames were sailing past Gibraltar and into the Mediterranean.
Following the coast of North Africa, the two vessels passed through the Suez Canal and then down the Red Sea. Finally, they entered the Strait of Hormuz, arriving at Das after 92 days at sea.
Once in the harbour, extensions to the legs and drilling tower were added to make the rig fully operational. In the last week of December, Sheikh Shakhbut was flown in for an official inspection.
At the start of the year, the Enterprise went to sea again, a short journey of 32km east and north from Das, and on January 10, meaning drilling could begin.
For 77 days they drilled through the 30-million-year-old limestone, until on March 28, 1958, and at a depth of 2,668 metres – three times the height of the Burj Khalifa – the bit broke through the rock blocking the oil reservoir that would become the Umm Shaif field.
After celebrations, a small amount of the oil was placed in glass jars and sent to Abu Dhabi. At his majlis in Qasr Al Hosn, it was presented to Sheikh Shakhbut.
Finally, the long wait was over.
The wealth of a nation
It would be another four years before the first oil reached the international markets, but Abu Dhabi’s future prosperity was assured. On July 4, 1962, the tanker British Signal set sail from Das Island carrying 254,544 barrels of crude, the first oil from Abu Dhabi to be sold on the open market.
The numbers that follow tell part of the next chapter in the story. By the following year, oil production had quadrupled to 44,000 barrels a day. In 1977 it had risen again to nearly 2 million and by 2011 it topped 3 million barrels.
The Umm Shaif field was followed by the even larger Zakum offshore field, and land discoveries at Murban Bab and the vast Bu Hasa. The UAE’s reserves are the seventh largest in the world.
With the revenue from oil, the entire UAE was transformed. In 1967, Sheikh Zayed replaced Sheikh Shakhbut as Ruler of Abu Dhabi and initiated a five-year reconstruction plan that laid the foundations of the city today.
The wealth brought jobs, free health care and education, and other benefits to the country’s citizens. It attracted expatriate workers in their millions.
The country’s Rulers have recognised that the fortunes of oil must also be used to build a future without it. Oil revenues have been invested in sectors including tourism, property, higher education and new technology.
In another 60 years, the UAE will be as unrecognisable to us as it would be today for someone living six decades ago.
But all of it traces back to that one day in March 1958, and the dawn of the age of oil.
At that moment a seismic force – for now unnoticed except by one young man – reverberates across the landscape