WATCHING THE WORLD BUSINESS AS USUAL

"Business as usual" was the confident response to an Oil & Gas Journal inquiry about life in the oil industry in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province now that the long expected campaign to liberate Kuwait has started.

Business as usual is certainly true at one level. Enemy action has had no direct effect on Saudi Arabian Oil Co.'s production operations. The amazingly prolific fields are still capable of flowing 8.5 million b/d.

It has taken a world surplus of crude oil and full storage tanks at export terminals to finally put the brake on Saudi production, now 2.5 million b/d down from its yearend 1990 peak.

WHAT'S AT RISK

At a personal level, business is a long way from usual.

Saudi Aramco personnel don't normally go to work carrying a gas mask or live under the constant threat of a SCUD missile attack from Iraqi occupied Kuwait.

Closest to military action are offshore workers in northern Saudi fields that adjoin the Neutral Zone. Those multiplatform complexes, within easy range of the virtually absent Iraqi air force, quite naturally were the first to feel the effects of the declining demand for Saudi oil on world markets. Production has been sharply curtailed.

Onshore, production and gathering centers present a much harder target. As the Iran-Iraq war demonstrated, knocking out scattered production facilities is not an easy task.

In its attacks on Iran, Iraqi firepower concentrated on tanker terminals and refineries. Kharg Island remained a symbol of Iranian resistance against Iraq's almost unchallenged air supremacy throughout the war.

Although severely battered and occasionally forced to suspend operations for short periods, the National Iranian Oil Co. staff on Kharg Island always managed to effect rapid repairs needed to get oil flowing again.

Saudi Arabia's huge refining, storage, and export complex at Ras Tanura, about 200 miles south of the border with the Neutral Zone, and alternative loading facilities at Juaymah are among the most heavily defended areas in the Middle East. They present a much tougher target than Kharg Island ever was.

Fifty miles closer to the action is the industrial city of Jubail, home of most of Saudi Arabia's petrochemical industry and a 280,000 b/d export refinery owned and jointly operated by the Royal Dutch/Shell Group and the Saudis' state oil company, Petromin.

The Jubail refinery, like all refining units in Saudi Arabia, is running flat out to offset the shortfall from Saudi Aramco's giant Ras Tanura refinery. At Ras Tanura engineering teams are working around the clock to bring a fire damaged distillation column back into service and restore capacity to 530,000 b/d.

Jubail is operating with its full complement of expatriate and local workers. Foreign employees were given the opportunity to transfer out of the region when the military buildup began, but no one took up the offer.

BACK TO BACHELORHOOD

For expatriates throughout the northern part of the Middle East perhaps the most noticeable personal change of lifestyle as a result of the current crisis is the loss of family life.

Wives and children have been sent home for the duration.

For the men left behind it's a return to the bachelor existence that was once a feature of expatriate life in the Middle East.

Copyright 1991 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.