Aramco's assets approx. $2.2 - $7 trillion dollars!!!

It has been a solid week since my last post. I am currently on another specialty tool job, and I will post this once I get back to camp. I have settled into my camp, shop, and met many people that are filled with useful knowledge for my job. I intend to take this knowledge with me back to Angola or on to whatever location may be next. Here in Saudi they run the most complex services for a difficult company – Saudi Aramco.

Aramco is officially the biggest “company” in the world with net assets of 3-7 trillion dollars! Back in the early 1900’s the Saudi government asked Southern Ca. Oil and Gas and New Jersey oil and gas to help them search for, and develop, their oil reserves. They both had about a 30% stake in the conglomeration called ARAMCO, which stood for Arabaian-American Oil Company. Saudi Arabia’s reserves were proved to be the most in the world, and the government bought out the two companies for healthy prices, launching them into their current or parent companies, Exxon-Mobile and Chevron! Now ARAMCO is only referred to as Saudi Aramco, which only means Saudi-Arabian Oil Company. It is the only oil company in Saudi Arabia and is run by the King’s brother or cousin…

Our salesmen here are genius! They manage to sell so many expensive services to Aramco, I can’t believe it. I feel like I have observed an axiom in sales – if you know the customers products/industry (oil exploration and production in this case) better than he does, you can sell them anything. I will definitely try to learn something from them before I leave.

The compound that I am staying at is called Eurovillage. It has ~400 houses with anywhere from 1-8 rooms in each house. (I was incorrect in my earlier post) All-in-all, the facility houses 1200 oilfield employees and is mostly run by Asians. There is a proper restaurant with 30 meal choices and a buffet for every meal. Laundry is done daily and the rooms are cleaned for us. It’s a pretty sweet gig. On top of that, there are 3 basketball courts, 2 soccer fields (with proper irrigated grass), tennis courts, a running track, a gym, and a pool. All of these services (food, maid, etc.) are included in the house rental fee. One 4-person house is rented for one year for $170,000 USD!!! It is the cheaper of the camps!! The upper level management stay at another-nicer camp. So far I have taken advantage of almost all of these services.

My daily routine is to get up at 4am (if the prayers haven’t already woken me up at 0330.) Run for two miles around the track, go to the gym by 0430, then at 0530 I go back to my room, shower, eat breakfast by 0600, then commute to work (35 min) by 0640. Once I get to work I normally Skype Chelsea for a few minutes, then at 0730 we have our morning meeting with the sub-sub PSL leads (i.e. tech workshop lead, shop foremen, sonde foremen, tech advisors, all engineers). We discuss the jobs that will be coming up and go through every engineer and assign a task if they don’t already have one. The meeting is ultra-efficient, considering how much we cover, and never takes longer than 30 minutes. We work all day in blistering heat until about 1630, then leave to go home. We normally get home around 1715, eat, then I try to Skype people with the super crappy internet that I “steal” from poor Afaqmenishal (seriously), play a game of basketball with the short Asians until they ask me to leave, then I go to bed around 2200. Annnnnnnd repeat 7 days a week.

Good here are crazy cheap. With the conversion rate set at 3.75SAR (Saudi Riyals) to 1USD it’s a sweet deal. Most things are approximate the same cost as in the US, just with this advantageous exchange rate. I have found these juice drinks that are dairy/fruit based that have real chunks of fruit in them for 1 riyal and they are delicious!!! I will try and find out the name.

I already implied from the previous paragraph that the food is WAY better here than most other locations. There are about 30 meal choices daily and they range from spaghetti, (my fav.) to steak and eggs, BLT’s, Caesar salads, etc. Most people that have been here for 4-5 years would not agree with this, but for now. I think the food is great, especially compared to Angola.

Since I have been here, I have had the opportunity to acquaint myself with many people. Several people that would posses the power to hire me have actually asked, why don’t you stay here, or you should ask your boss if they will release you… all very nice indirect-complimentary things to say. To make this more enticing, I recently talked with my boss in Angola, and it seems that open hole logging (my specialty) is very slow, I would be filling in cased hole jobs as they have to turn down approx. one million dollars a month due to being short on cased hole engineers. On one hand, I am excited to have the opportunity to get more cased hole experience since I have only done about 40 jobs in cased hole (but about 300-400 open hole jobs), but on the other it will mean that I will once again, put me at a training level, not making much money in bonus until I can run the necessary services. It should only take one hitch to get caught up on these cased hole services, then after that it should be “easy money.” At the end of the day, I have already told this boss that I would work in Angola, I have good friends that already work there, and I think that – in the long run – I can make more money in Angola than any where else in the world. So I have chosen to stay in Angola, at least for one year.

This trip to Saudi is VERY beneficial! I have learned a TON, not only about this specific specialty tool (say that ten times fast), but about better practices on tools I had previously considered myself proficient at running. I hope to catch at least 3-4 more jobs and finish my training here by Ramadan, which starts August 1^st. 

I am going to post pictures tomorrow or the next day, so stay posted for my post. =)