When oil was discovered and exploited in Bahrain, then in Saudi Arabia, and – after the Second World War – in rapid succession in other Gulf countries, new ports were needed not only to export crude oil via tankers but also to import heavy goods, equipment, and cement for building oil-extraction facilities, labour camps, and new urban conurbations to serve the oil fields. Saudi Arabia’s Dammam was such a port.
In a striking scene in his magnificent petro-novel about Saudi Arabia, Cities of Salt, Abdulrahman Munif writes about the arrival of the cargo ships that brought with them the tools and equipment required for drilling oil. As more and more ships came to Saudi Arabia, more and more infrastructure was required to cope with the arriving cargo. The volume of goods was now far too large for offshore lighterage (offloading cargo onto barges whose shallower draughts were better accommodated by the coastal shoals). Munif tells the story of how the port area was built.
The ships docked one after the other, and no sooner were the huge crates mounted up in ever higher hills with every new ship, than another large plot of land was sealed off behind barbed wire. This land began in the middle of the gulf coastline and stretched northward and eastward as far as the far-off hills … Soon after the arrival of a new group of foreign men in a ship different from the others, a phase of work began that never slowed or stopped. It was like madness or magic. Men raced back and forth with the raging yellow machines that created new hills racing behind them. They filled the sea and levelled the land, they did all this without pausing and without reflection.8
If ships are to berth at the shore, rather than out to sea, harbours have to be dredged. The Gulf coastline, as I have already written, is quite shallow, subject to underwater shamal currents and thus, without interference, it is not amenable to the close berthing of ships with deeper draughts. To make these new ports, the existing rhythm of life and spaces of work on the sea had to be changed. Fishermen were no longer welcome where the large cargo ships and tankers steamed. Seaside villages, if not razed, were overshadowed by the great ports and the refineries disgorging fire and smoke.
Until the Ras Tanura and Al-Khobar piers were built to load crude and bring in imports, shallow barges to and from Bahrain managed all trade with Saudi Arabia’s Gulf coast. In Saudi Arabia, California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC) soon changed its name to Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco). Bahrain Petroleum Company (BAPCO) was operated by a subsidiary of California Standard Oil Company. The intimacy of the geographies of Saudi Arabia and Bahrain, not to mention corporate relations between the two companies, facilitated the collaboration in construction, refining and sale of crude.
The first tanker to take up oil at Ras Tanura was celebrated with a fanfare that indicated the significance of the oil port. DG Scofield was almost 140 metres long and could carry 81,224 barrels of crude and 10,676 barrels of fuel.9 As Robert Vitalis recounts, King Abdulaziz was there to turn the valve to fill the ship, sending off ‘the first tanker full of Saudi crude to pay for all the roads, railways, ministries, prisons, pipelines, and palaces that the new California construction company Bechtel Brothers ultimately built for the Al Saud’.10
During World War II, Aramco was forced to halt production due to shortages of personnel and equipment. In his commissioned hagiography of Aramco, Wallace Stegner describes the momentary silence of the oil terminals:
At Ras Tanura the crude oil tank farm stood idle, the pumps were still, the port facilities were unused … No crude coursed through the pipeline from Dammam, no tanker followed the course of the D.G. Scofield to the moorings … Any tankers plying the Gulf, and any naval vessels in need of refuelling, were headed for Bahrain or Abadan, where they could obtain refined products.11
By 1944, production had begun again. In that year, 60,000 tonnes of equipment arrived at the rudimentary Al-Khobar pier and the Ras Tanura cargo wharves, intended for repairing the oil fields left idle during the war. Ras Tanura’s harbour was so busy with tankers loading crude, as well as with unloading nearly 260,000 tonnes of cargo in one year, that plans were made in 1946 to relieve the pressure on the oil terminal by building a new port exclusively to receive cargo.12 Only five years later, Dammam had been transformed from a small village into a major port, connected to Riyadh by a newly built railway.
In the 1950s, Aramco’s maritime operations required an outpost at Jeddah on the Red Sea, where both crude and bunkering fuel were sold to its customers. Archival records show bout after bout of expansion of piers at Dammam, Ras Tanura, and Jeddah, including a major dredging programme in 1967 to address the silting of all three harbours and deepen the draughts to accommodate VLCCs and ULCCs. The Aramco report for 1970 described the process of deepening as drilling holes into ‘rocky knolls’ in the seabed and dredging away a vast section of the seabed to a depth of nearly thirty metres. The new oil terminal of Ju’ayma was built in 1974 on the Gulf coast and is today the largest crude-loading port of Saudi Arabia. The late 1970s saw nothing but the expansion of tank farms and the addition of new berths and offshore technologies, including sea islands to facilitate loading ULCCs at some distance from the shore.13
The effect of such traffic in both crude and cargo was not only to expand ports and offshore loading islands and buoys in Saudi Arabia, but also to expand Aramco’s procurement and distribution activities in the US and Europe. Trucking fleets, pipelines, and barge ports were all mustered. The network of trade in petroleum, refined products, and goods and equipment needed for the oil business extended worldwide.14 Only the Tanker Wars of the 1980s between Iran and Iraq brought a temporary abatement in the business both of Ras Tanura and Dammam. Both ports continue to be – along with others on the Gulf coast of Saudi Arabia – operated by Aramco and, as such, are far less transparent to outside scrutiny than ports managed by cargo port authorities.
As in Bahrain before Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait after, the development of these new harbours was facilitated through the work of petroleum corporations that did not originally specialise in harbour construction, transport engineering, or infrastructure management. The early financing for these ports and harbours came not from the public purse or through fiscal allocations, but from investments by foreign petroleum companies. The private ownership structures of these cargo ports limited the extent to which local merchants and traders could access them; such shared use was only secured through negotiation or force.
Of course, this was a pattern familiar from the corporate sovereigns of the colonial era, foremost among them the myriad East India Companies. In the Gulf, British and American petroleum companies forged a vertical integration of infrastructure construction and commodity extraction that facilitated the emergence of this new and rapacious form of commodity capitalism. They did so for a long time with total carte blanche, their ‘developmental’ programmes blurring into the work of states, their officers and officials playing musical chairs in the consultancies or diplomatic corps of their home countries. The histories of Mina Ahmadi and Shuwaikh in Kuwait, Dammam and Ras Tanura in Saudi Arabia, and others in the upper Gulf are intimately tied to the history of extraction of oil there.
Creeks and Harbours of the Trucial Coast
Most of the Dubai shore line is a flat and barren waste traversed by small creeks and with little vegetation beyond coarse grass, clumps of mangroves, and an occasional small garden or palm grove around a well. In fact, this stretch of coast is so flat that the little hill of Jebel Ali is the chief landmark. A long reef running parallel to the shore has been the graveyard of many vessels, including the British East India Company’s sloop Elphinstone which struck there in 1837.
Richard Sanger, Arabian Peninsula
Dubai’s history differs from that of