The shifting sands of the Arabian Peninsula hide more than their fair share of secrets. Once, flourishing lakes teeming with life lie buried beneath scorching dunes. Even entire cities have been swallowed by the gaping maw of the desert. “Searching for and finding one of them is one of the great adventures of a lifetime,” said John Faulhaber, at a recent meeting of the Arabian Natural History Association “Just reading about it is exciting.”
One such city was Ubar, “the Atlantis of the Sands.” Ubar flourished from about 2800 BCE to about 300 CE as a remote desert outpost where...

Saudi Aramco industrial facilities often take a beating. Fouling and scaling reduce heat transfer in exchanger tubes and cause corrosion in pipes. That can lead to a loss of production as unplanned shutdowns become necessary to fix leaking equipment. Standard methods of chemical treatment reduce fouling and corrosion, but their effects can be limited. So Riyadh Refinery is pioneering a new technology by the Merus Company.

The technology resolves cooling-water issues and provides a state-of-the-art technique to eliminate fouling and to clean fouled equipment. That, in turn, saves the time...

A new range of Zipex lubricants was launched in Dubai today, as a result of a joint venture between Indonesian company Pertamina, the biggest producer and marketer of mineral lubricants in Southeast Asia and SK Energy, the biggest Korean producer and marketer of synthetic lubricants, in association with the Flow Trading LLC, the local partner.
The co-branded range of ZIPEX will be made in Pertamina’s factory in Jakarta, using the time-tested formula of Pertamina lubricants in Indonesia. In the early phase, ZIPEX will be launched in 3 ranges. Each of the ranges will comprise as 3 and 2...

Vela International Marine Ltd.’s Almizan Star, the fourth of six very large crude carriers ordered from Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering, entered service Wednesday after a naming ceremony at the South Korean shipyard. Khalid A. Al-Falih, Saudi Aramco’s executive vice president of Operations, presided over the ceremony attended by more than 50 guests, including Daewoo Shipbuilding president and CEO Sang Tae Nam, S-Oil CEO Ahmed Al-Subaey and Saud A. Bukhari, manager of Vela’s Technical and Support Department. The new vessel is built to the latest shipbuilding rules and...

The Ministry of Oil of the Republic of Iraq and a wholly owned affiliate of Royal Dutch Shell plc (‘Shell’) signed a Heads of Agreement that sets the commercial principles to establish an incorporated joint venture (the ‘JV’) between the South Gas Company and Shell for the processing and marketing of all associated natural gas produced in the Governorate of Basra in Southern Iraq, an area covering some 19,000 square kilometers.
The signature follows the approval [ref: 329/2008] of the Iraqi Council of Ministers on 7th September 2008.
Some 700 million standard cubic feet per day of...

Members of the Dhahran Geological Society got an update on the South Rub’ al-Khali Co. (SRAK), a joint venture of Saudi Aramco and Royal Dutch Shell from Ceri Powell, now vice president of Strategy for Shell International.
Powell, an SRAK board member and at the time of the talk Shell International’s vice president of Exploration in the Middle East and Caspian Sea, enumerated the challenges the company faces in those regions and shared the breakthrough thinking and technologies the company employs. She said Shell Exploration and Production aligns its exploration technology with the...