THE OIL AGE ARRIVES31a whooshing sound and soon got the first whiff of the oil that would
transform Bahrain and the other desolate lands surrounding it.
Crews erected derricks, pipelines, tanks, roads, and piers. The toffee-
colored crude oil that flowed from under the desert was piped to the
coast and shipped to industrializing Europe and Asia. Over the coming
months, years, and decades, Westerners would flock to the region in
search of characteristic salt domes like Jebel Dukhan, formations that
often signal the presence of oil and gas trapped in geological fissures deep
underground.
Socal’s big prize was next door, in Saudi Arabia. In 1933 it signed a
concession agreement with the new king, Ibn Saud, who had just achieved
formal recognition as the absolute ruler of a consolidated kingdom. Socal
shipped Ibn Saud what must have seemed at the time like a rent mother-
lode: $775,000 in gold bullion. In return, Socal received a sixty- year
concession over 360,000 square miles of eastern Saudi desert.
The concession gave Socal exclusive rights to extract and market any
petroleum it found while leaving the company to assume all the risks of
exploration and costs of development. The company received nothing if
it found nothing. If it struck oil, Socal held the rights to produce and
export it far into the future, long after Ibn Saud would be gone, right up
until the year 1993. The fledgling Saudi state simply had no means to find
or produce oil, and it did not understand the magnitude of the wealth it
had consigned to foreign control for multiple generations.
Socal didn’t yet know what a huge prize it had won, either. The firm
sent just two geologists to explore the vast concession, a region a third
larger than Texas. Later, it expanded the crew to ten. By 1934, the wild-
catters had zeroed in on an intriguing geological structure in the al- Hasa
region near the Persian Gulf coast, another rocky hill that bore the char-
acteristics of a salt dome. They named it the Dammam Dome, after a
nearby village. On April 30, 1935, Dammam No. 1, the first oil well drilled
in the kingdom, was spudded in.^4
Drilling on the Dammam Dome proceeded slowly. Drillers’ logs
chronicle hard limestone at 260 feet, water at 312 feet, tar at 385. At 1,774
feet, there were initial signs of oil and gas. By the end of August, when
the well reached a depth of 1,886 feet, Socal’s drillers produced the first