Burly US geologist Max Steineke discovered Saudis’ black gold

HE left his family’s farm in Oregon aged 12 to haul logs in California in 1910, but Max Steineke arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1934 and changed the course of modern history.

Max Steineke, American geologist, who found the first payable oil deposit in Saudi Arabia in 1938.

MAX Steineke, one of nine children born to German immigrants, left his family’s farm in Oregon at 12 to haul logs in a Californian timber mill.

He found board with a schoolteacher, who encouraged him to continue his education.

In 1917, at age 19, Steineke was admitted to Stanford University, which then did not require an entry exam, and in 1921 graduated with a degree in geology.

Over the next 13 years he helped search for oil for Standard Oil of California (SoCal) in California, Canada and Colombia for six years, at Point Barrow and Cape Simpson in northern Alaska, and in New Zealand. Then Steineke asked to be sent to SoCal’s latest exploration fields, on the Arabian Persian Gulf coast. He arrived in Saudi Arabia in 1934, and set about tedious drilling that on March 3, 1938, changed the course of modern history.

Saudi Arabia’s first king, Ibn Saud, had formally founded the nation in 1932 after uniting four Arabian regions, Hejaz, Najd, Eastern Arabia and Southern Arabia, as a single state in a succession of conquests over 30 years.

American geologist Max Steineke and his US colleagues grew long beards and dressed in the garb of native Bedouins.

In May 1932, SoCal and the Bahrain Petroleum Company had struck oil on the nearby island of Bahrain, where SoCal geologist Fred Davis observed a low coastal hill, Jabal Dhahran or Dammam Dome, about 32km to the west. Davies noted that the Saudi jabal resembled limestone at Jabal Dukhan in Bahrain, where oil was found. Also eager to find oil, Ibn Saud signed an oil concession agreement with SoCal in May 1933, and late that year the first US geologists began to survey around the Dammam Dome.

Steineke arrived in Saudi Arabia for SoCal’s second field exploration. He found rocky, gravel soils, a flat landscape marked with occasional rocky jabals, or hills, and heatwave mirages shimmering over salt flats. SoCal personnel lived in primitive camps, starting with tents near the Arabian Gulf. When Steineke’s wife Florence and young daughters Maxine and Marian arrived in 1935, they lived in mud huts that eventually provided airconditioning.

Described as “burly, big jawed, hearty, enthusiastic, profane, indefatigable, careless of irrelevant details and implacable in tracking down a line of scientific inquiry”, Steineke and his US colleagues grew long beards and dressed in the garb of native Bedouins.

Saudi Arabia oil drilling team in the 1940s.

Pilot Dick Kerr also arrived in 1934 in a Fairchild plane designed for aerial photography. Kerr flew patterns over the desert as geologists identified anticlines, or upfolds of stratified rock that form an inverted V-shape hill or range: about 80 per cent of the world’s petroleum has been found in anticlinal traps. By June, 10 Americans, mainly geologists working for SoCal subsidiary Casoc, were scouting for the best place to sink the first wildcat, or exploratory, well. When aircraft spotters located a feature that seemed promising, a land crew then travelled out by camel or in specially modified trucks.

During 1935 Steineke and other SoCal geologists found several promising locations on the Saudi east coast, and began drilling a few miles from the Gulf on the flank of Dhahran jabal. Early wells such as Dammam No. 2 showed promise, with small shows of oil but none of an economic quantity.

Steineke was appointed chief Casoc geologist in 1936, holding the position until 1950, but after sinking millions of dollars into unsuccessful wells, in 1937 SoCal management in California was getting anxious. In spring 1937 Steineke and a colleague, Floyd Meeker, took a field expedition across the Arabian Peninsula from the eastern gulf to Jeddah on the Red Sea, dramatically enhancing their understanding of Saudi geology.

The Dammam No. 7 oil well in Saudi Arabia in the 1940s.

SoCal wildcat drillers began their seventh well, Dammam No. 7, in December, 1936. This well would penetrate to deeper rock than earlier holes. But Damman No. 7 was beset by trouble, with caving rock, stuck drill pipes and repeated equipment failures. The struggle continued for 16 months, finally hitting oil at 609m below the depth of earlier holes.

On a test, when the drill pipe again stuck and was never recovered, it produced at a rate of nearly 4000 barrels of oil a day. Steineke had been recalled to California to convince SoCal executives to continue Saudi exploration when news came through from Riyadh that on March 3, 1938, the Dammam No. 7 drilling team had struck oil at a depth of 1440m.

It was the first well to penetrate what was later described as the “Arab Zone”, a deeper geological layer of rock that held most of Saudi Arabia’s oil. Steineke, who developed structural drilling techniques for mapping subsurface geology, had discovered the huge Abqaiq field, with 12 billion barrels of recoverable oil. By 1940 the Dammam field was producing more than 12,000 barrels per day, in a country that has more than a quarter of the world’s total proven reserves, of over 264 billion barrels.

In mid-2018, Saudi oil supplier Aramco plans to publicly list 5 per cent of its $US2 trillion company.

Originally published as Burly US geologist Max Steineke discovered Saudis’ black gold