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Giant Gas Fields of Saudi Arabia

n this chapter describing the recent discovery of several giant gas fields in the Paleozoic
of Saudi Arabia, Mahmoud Abdul-Baqi highlights the progressive evolution of technical

effort in the Kingdom. Early technical work had been led by expatriates seconded to Aramco. Over the years, Saudis gradually moved to technical and leadership positions, and now
Saudi Aramco has become a modern major oil company.
Significant research capabilities have evolved within Saudi Aramco to support its exploration effort. This exploration effort to discover non-associated natural gas has been so successful that it has shifted the national strategy for Saudi energy usage from oil to gas.
In its early years, Saudi Arabia wanted and needed outside assistance. Modern Saudi
Aramco welcomes (but does not need) outside assistance. This evolution of the company
mirrors changes in the country, and can be a model for other oil-rich developing nations.
M. W. Downey

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Giant Gas Fields of Saudi Arabia

Mahmoud Abdul-Baqi
Saudi Aramco, Exploration Organization, Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

The success of the gas

exploration program has
prompted a shift in
national strategy to
expand the petrochemical industries and
rely on natural gas for
power generation and
seawater desalination.
The success also
encouraged international oil companies
to put forward
proposals to participate
in the Kingdoms nonassociated gas
exploration,
development, and
utilization programs.

ABSTRACT: The history of gas exploration of

Saudi Aramco goes back to the early exploration
years in Saudi Arabia. In 1957, the first commercial non-associated gas field was discovered in the
Permian Khuff Formation at the Dammam Dome
structure. In 1971, the first of 5 giant Khuff gas
fields comprising the overall greater Ghawar
(Khuff) Gas field was discovered and became the
foundation for significant non-associated gas
reserves and production by Saudi Aramco. With
the Khuff Formation becoming the dominant gas
reservoir in Saudi Arabia, other exploration plays
were also aggressively pursued. In 1994, a nonassociated gas program was started to explore for
non-associated gas, focusing on several plays
including the Khuff, Permo-Carboniferous
Unayzah, and Devonian Jauf Formations. This
program was initiated to fuel expansion in gasbased power generation, seawater desalination,
and petrochemical industries. This non-associated
gas program has been remarkably successful, having drilled a total of 28 exploration wells with an
overall exploration success rate of 54%, resulting
in 15 new gas fields, and having discovered in
excess of 44 tcf of additional non-associated gas
reserves at year-end 2001.

Introduction
This chapter on the early history of exploration in
Saudi Arabia, and the giant gas fields, was first

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presented by the author at the AAPG Forum on

Discoverers of the 20th Century in March 2002.
The goal in writing this chapter is to share a great
heritage and highlight how the early oil exploration in Saudi Arabia has eventually led to the
discovery of the giant gas fields containing
reserves that drive a fast-growing industry. This
chapter begins with a brief review of the early
exploration history of Saudi Arabia, and describes
the non-associated gas program and its plays.
Towards the end of the chapter, the technical
challenges facing Saudi Arabias exploration activities are highlighted, and examples of the technical innovations researchers developed to meet
these challenges are described.

Early Exploration History

in Saudi Arabia
The history of hydrocarbon exploration in Saudi
Arabia goes back about seventy years, with the
signing of a concession agreement between Saudi
Arabia and Standard Oil Company of California
(Socal). The agreement was signed by the Saudi
Finance Minister, Abdullah Al-Sulayman, and
Lloyd N. Hamilton, a senior Socal lawyer, in Jiddah in 1933 (Figure 1). With this agreement, Socal
obtained the exclusive right to explore and develop oil in eastern Saudi Arabia, and preferential
rights to most of the rest of the kingdom. The
agreement also called for an immediate start of

Copyright 2005 by The American Association of Petroleum Geologists.

DOI: 10.1306/1034747SP3152

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exploration, for drilling to begin as soon as a suitable structure was found, and for construction of
a refinery after oil was discovered.
In 1933, ground and air reconnaissance started in earnest (Figures 2, 3). The use of airplanes
was an essential part of the early exploration campaign due to the large concession area. In fact,
Socal sought permission to use them early on during the original negotiations. By the following
year, 1934, a small group of enthusiastic explorers
had been assembled, working for Socals new subsidiary, California Arabian Standard Oil Company

(Casoc), later to become Aramco and eventually

Saudi Aramco.
Among the early explorers was Max
Steineke (Figure 4), a big man with a big arm
and a big voice, whose contribution to understanding the geology of the Arabian Peninsula
would later shape the exploration efforts in this
area. Aiding that group were Saudis in a wide
variety of jobs, such as Khamis Rimthan (Figure
5), a rugged, determined, and effective field
guide whose head was a human compass,
according to early explorers (to this day, the

Rimthan Field remains the only field in Saudi

Arabia named after a person).
Early exploration activities were difficult, but
ground and air reconnaissance continued, and culminated in several field maps that describe the
surface structures (Figure 6) and located a suitable
spot to drill. In April 1935, the first well,
Dammam Well No. 1, commenced drilling (Figure
7) on the Dammam Dome structure (Figure 8).
The well, unfortunately, produced no more that
about 100 bbl of oil a day from the Cretaceous
Wasia Formation, which was hardly a commercial

Figure 1. Signing of the concession

agreement between Saudi Arabia and
Socal in Khuzam Palace, Jiddah, in 1933.
Pictured are the Saudi Finance Minister,
Abdullah Al-Sulayman, and Lloyd N.
Hamilton, a senior Socal lawyer.

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Figure 2. Early field mapping party.

Much of the early geology was
mapped by crews similar to this field
mapping party. Surface expressions
of geologic structures were identified
and their limits surveyed. Work
progressed forward in an area bigger
than Texas. Mapping was done under
difficult conditions. Both heat and
sandstorms often confined the
geologists to their field tents, until
mapping conditions improved.

Figure 3. Early aviation. Air

reconnaissance provided invaluable
help in mapping the vast concession
areas in early exploration. Picture
taken in 1935.

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success in Saudi Arabia, and was completed as a
gas well, producing gas from a shallow horizon
for domestic cooking and heating. It is interesting
to note that the first well ever to be drilled in
Saudi Arabia was a gas discovery!
Of course, at that time, the focus was on discovering commercial quantities of oil for export,
and so several other wells were planned to be
drilled to test the same structure. The following
year, Dammam Well No. 7 started drilling, targeting the Jurassic Arab formation, and in March of
1938, it flowed 3800 bbl/day from that formation
(Figure 9). Lucky No. 7 was a tough well to drill,
encountering several operational problems during
drilling, but it turned out to be a steady and reliable producer and the start of a new era for Saudi
Arabia and the oil industry. In fact, it was still
capable of producing 1800 bbl/day when it was
taken out of production in 1989, even after turning out more than 32 million bbl of production in
almost 45 years of service.
The following year, in 1939, His Majesty King
Abdul-Aziz paid his first visit to the newly constructed oil installation (Figure 10), and, in 1944,
the company changed its name to Arabian American Oil Company, abbreviated as Aramco. Without His Majestys guidance and vision, the entire
enterprise would not have been possible.

Gas Exploration and the

Non-associated Gas Program
Numerous oil and gas discoveries were made in
the years that followed. The first commercial gas
discovery, though, was in 1957 in Dammam Well
No. 45, which flowed 22 mmcf of gas per day
from the deeper Permian Khuff Formation. Other
major gas discoveries include Haradh (1971), Ain

Figure 4. Max
Steineke, a big
man with a big
arm and a big
voice. Picture
taken in 1937.

Dar (1975), Hawiyah (1979), Shedgm (1979), and

Uthmaniyah (1980). These discoveries are part of
one: The greater Ghawar Field, the largest oil field
in the world and one of the biggest gas fields
worldwide (Figure 11).
More recently, with the change of emphasis
for in-Kingdom energy consumption towards gas,

the current non-associated gas program started in

earnest in 1994. This deep-gas exploration program started in 1994 with the discovery of sweet
gas in the Devonian sandstones along the east
flank of the giant Ghawar anticline a fault and
unconformity truncation play of the Devonian
Jauf sandstones. By the end of 2001, the program

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Figure 5. Khamis Rimthan, a
field guide with the
equivalent of a human
compass in his head. Picture
taken in 1938.

had drilled 28 wildcat and deeper pool wells, targeting Permian to Silurian reservoirs at depths of
12,000 to 18,000 ft (3660 to 5490 m) (Figure 11).
The program made 15 significant discoveries,
9 in deep, four-way closures, 4 in combination
structural/stratigraphic traps, and 2 deeper pools,
amounting to an exploration success rate of 54%.
The program has added 44 tcf of non-associated
gas reserves, and led to a recent commissioning of
a gas plant in Hawiyah with a capacity of 1.6
bcf/day, while a second plant with the same
capacity in the vicinity of Haradh is under construction.

Permian Khuff Gas Play

Figure 6. 1935 field

map compiled by Koch
and Steineke. Early
exploration was based
on surface structure
maps like this.

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The late Permian Khuff Formation is the dominant non-associated gas reservoir in Saudi Arabia.
The Khuff Formation is primarily composed of
carbonates, evaporites, and lagoonal shales, and
represents shallow-water deposits containing 5
major depositional cycles. Each cycle starts gradually with a transgressive subtidal grainstone,
which comprises the reservoir, and ends gradually
with regressive intertidal and supratidal carbonate
muds and evaporites, which make up the reservoir seals (Figure 12). High porosities found in
these depositional cycles are associated with
leached oolitic limestones and high-energy grainstones, which are commonly dolomitized. The
Khuff A, B, and C are the main gas reservoirs in
the Khuff.
Within Saudi Arabia, the Khuff Formation
ranges in thickness from 430 to 3100 ft (130 to 950
m). The total isopach of the Khuff is illustrated in
Figure 13. The Khuff thickness increases to the
north and east of Ghawar, and also increases into
the Rub Al-Khali basin to the southeast. Local

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Figure 7. Dammam Well No. 1.

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Figure 8.
Dammam Dome
structure. Current
Saudi Aramco
headquarters are
located just about
the top of the
dome.

variations in thickness caused by pre-Khuff faulting and tectonics are also common.
The first Khuff gas field in the Middle East
was discovered in 1948, in Awali, Bahrain, by
drilling the Bahrain Well No. 52 to the Khuff Formation at a depth of 10,078 ft (3072 m). Following
the successful gas discovery at Dammam Dome in
1957, a period of regional study and detailed outcrop work on the Khuff reservoir was undertaken
and culminated in a new round of exploratory
drilling. In 1971, the giant Haradh Khuff Gas Field
was discovered in the southern portion of
Ghawar (Figure 14), and this was followed by the
discovery of 4 more giant Khuff gas fields on the
greater Ghawar structure (Table 1).
Today, Saudi Aramco continues to explore
and develop the Khuff gas reservoir in and around
Ghawar. The first Khuff horizontal well was
drilled in 1997; since then, horizontal drilling has
proved to be very useful in the gas development
strategy. An ongoing and extensive study of the
depositional facies and diagenetic controls on
Khuff reservoir porosity continue today with data
based on detailed core description, facies correlation, and thin-section analysis. Additionally, geo-

Table 1. Major historical gas field discoveries.

Field
Discovered
Dammam
1957
Haradh
1971
Ain Dar
1975
Hawiyah
1979
Shedgum
1979
Uthmaniyah 1980
Berri
1978
Qatif
1981

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Reservoir
Khuff
Khuff, Unayzah
Khuff
Khuff, Jauf
Khuff, Jauf
Khuff, Jauf
Khuff
Khuff, Jauf

Greater
Ghawar
field

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Figure 9. Dammam Well No. 7. The first commercial oil discovery,

Figure 10. His Majesty King Abdul-Aziz visiting newly constructed oil

1938.

facilities in the eastern Province in 1939.

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Figure 11. Recent

gas discoveries
in the nonassociated gas
program.

physical research aimed at improving seismic

imaging of the Khuff reservoir is showing good
results at Saudi Aramco (Figure 15).

Pre-Khuff Paleozoic Plays

There are 2 major plays in the pre-Khuff Paleozoic
siliciclastic sandstones of eastern Saudi Arabia:
The Devonian Jauf and the Carboniferous to
Lower Permian Unayzah. The source rocks for
both plays are the Lower Silurian Qusaiba hot
shale. The plays exist on and at the flanks of the
giant Ghawar anticline and in adjacent satellite
structures. The trap styles range from simple fourway closures to complex combinations of stratigraphic and structural traps (Figure 16), including
downthrown fault plays.

Unayzah Gas Exploration

The Lower Permian Unayzah Formation is
quickly becoming the second major non-associated gas reservoir in Saudia Arabia, with 10 gas
fields discovered or showing significant extension potential since 1994 (Figure 17). The most
recent discovery is the Mazalij Field, located 60
miles (95 km) west of Ghawar (Figure 11). In the
Mazalij Field, non-associated gas in commercial
quantities was discovered in the downthrown
fault block of the main Mazalij structure (Figure
18). The upthrown block was drilled in the
1970s and proved to be barren of the Unayzah
sands due to a combination of erosion and nondeposition.
The Unayzah Formation is a thick sequence
of continental sediments that were deposited on
the pre-Unayzah (Hercynian) unconformity. The
Unayzah is composed of a mix of facies types,
ranging from fluvial and eolian sandstones, siltstones, and mudstones, to debris-flow conglomer-

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Figure 12. The various

depositional facies types
comprising the Khuff
Carbonate Ramp model are
shown here. Each Khuff
facies type is well
documented by available
core data.

ates and caliche paleo-soil deposits. The best

Unayzah gas reservoirs are mainly found in the
braided and meandering stream sands, and the
eolian dune sand facies. The non-reservoir siltstones and mudstone facies are associated with
local playa lake deposits. The top seal for the
Unayzah reservoirs are mainly the overlying
transgressive shales and carbonates of the basal
Khuff formation.

Devonian Jauf Gas Exploration

Two giant gas fields in the Devonian Jauf reservoirs have been discovered on the east flank of
Ghawar in Shedgum and Hawiyah fields. In 1980,
the Giant Shedgum (Jauf) gas field; and in 1994,
the giant Hawiyah (Jauf) gas field were added to
the impressive list of giant gas reservoirs associat-

ed with Ghawar field. The trapping style for the

Jauf reservoir is erosional truncation at the Hercynian unconformity, with transgressive shales
and carbonates of the overlying basal Khuff Formation acting as both lateral and top seals.
The Devonian Jauf sandstones have the most
favorable pre-Khuff reservoir development in the
Ghawar area. The Jauf reservoir consists of fineto-medium grained sandstones that are weakly
cemented by authigenic illite clays. The high level
of silica cementation and quartz-overgrowth
development, often associated with Paleozoicaged sandstones, appears to have been inhibited
by the presence of illite clays in the Devonian
reservoir.
Exploration for additional gas fields in the
Jauf reservoir is continuing by Saudi Aramco,

along the regional Jauf truncation limits. Major

improvements in seismic imaging technology
are allowing enhanced seismic imaging of the
Jauf truncation and reducing exploration drilling
risk.

Energy Needs
As mentioned above, Saudi Arabia is shifting its
local energy use emphasis from oil to gas (Figure
19). Supplying the new local gas need, (which is
increasing significantly and is expected to continue to increase over the coming years) are 5 operating gas plants in Berri, Shedgum, Abqaiq, Uthmaniyah, and Hawiyah, and one plant under construction in Haradh (Figures 11, 20).
The success of the gas exploration program
has prompted a shift in national strategy to

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Figure 13. A regional isopach of the Khuff Formation shows the influence of Paleozoic tectonics on Khuff
deposition. Note the thinning onto the Ghawar anticline and also major thickness increase into the Rub
Al-Khali basin located to the southeast.

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Figure 14. The Haradh

Gas field area is
associated with a
southeast-plunging
anticline. Currently a
very intensive
development program of
the Khuff and Pre-Khuff
gas reservoirs is ongoing.
At the same time, Saudi
Aramco is undergoing
major construction of the
Haradh gas plant,
scheduled for
commissioning in 2003
at a 1.6 bcf of gas per
day production level.

expand the petrochemical industries and rely on

natural gas for power generation and seawater
desalination. The success also encouraged international oil companies to put forward proposals to
participate in the Kingdoms non-associated gas
exploration, development, and utilization programs. Currently, the local consumption of gas is
about evenly divided between electric power generation, petrochemical plants, water desalination
plants (which also produce power), and other
industrial activities (Figure 21).

Technology Challenges
and Solutions
The non-associated gas program proved the
deep Khuff and pre-Khuff gas potential of the
Arabian basin, and has been an exploration and
development success. This success, however,
has not been without challenges. Some of these
challenges include the difficulty in estimating
the highly variable Unayzah and Jauf reservoir
quality, inter-bed seismic multiples (ghost reflections) contaminating most seismic sections, seismic velocity heterogeneity of the near-surface

layers (causing severe statics problems), and the

difficulty in estimating the intensity and orientation of subsurface fractures, which highly
influences the flow rate in several reservoirs.
In order to tackle these challenges, Saudi
Aramco researchers developed some innovative
technologies and tools, 4 of which are highlighted.

Coherence and DETECT

Coherence analysis is a useful way of detecting
anomalous areas within the seismic data. By
emphasizing edges in the seismic data, insight is

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Figure 15. A detailed view of the greater
Ghawar anticlinal structure at top Khuff
level. The entire Ghawar structure has been
covered by 3-D seismic surveys and merged
into a seismic supercube. The many faults
and structures comprising the Ghawar field
can be seen.

Figure 16. Paleozoic gas plays.

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gained by interpreters into the structure that
allows them to detect faults, fractures, and channels. This technology has become popular and
useful in recent years. However, by relying on
trace correlations or the eigenvalue solution, this
analysis may not reap a very lucid image of the
data. Saudi Aramco researchers developed a
new algorithm for computing coherence based
on generalized Hilbert transform, called
DETECT. As Hilbert transform is the natural
domain for emphasizing edges of the data (you
can think of it as the derivative of the data), the
algorithm that was developed yields significantly enhanced images of coherence. Figure 22
compares a coherence slide obtained from a
commercial package (left) with the one obtained
from DETECT of the same data (right). The
superiority of our tool is quite apparent in this
comparison, as the image obtained from
DETECT is much sharper and has significantly
more details than the commercial package. This
tool has become quite invaluable for predicting
faults, fractures, and sinkholes (Figure 23). Even
some unusual patterns, like subsurface crater
impacts, show very clearly on the DETECT
slices (Figure 24). A patent of this algorithm is
currently pending.

Figure 17. Receiving a strong effort and focus of the Saudi Aramco gas exploration program is
the pre-Khuff Unayzah formation. This Permo-Carboniferous aged gas reservoir is bound above
by the Khuff formation and was deposited on the Hercynian unconformity. The Unayzah is
depositionally, a mix of eolian, alluvial, and fluvial environments, with eolian sandstones
dominating gas producing reservoirs.

Fractal Deconvolution
One of the fundamental steps of seismic data processing is deconvolution. It is the process through
which the focus and resolution of the data is significantly enhanced by removing the wavelet and
reverberation effects from the raw seismic trace,
giving rise to a more accurate representation of
the reflection coefficients of the earth. However,
the conventional deconvolution method (spiking

or prediction-error filters) assumes that the reflectivity series follows the white noise model, with a
flat power spectrum an assumption that may
differ from the actual behavior observed in the
earth. Saudi Aramcos research and development
efforts resulted in a new algorithm based on a
new stochastic process, fractionally integrated
noise, which models the stochastic properties of

reflectivity to a much better extent than the conventional method. This new technique gives rise
to a better deconvolution scheme, with enhanced
resolution, event continuity, and wavelet compression. Figure 25 shows the same seismic section processed by the conventional deconvolution
method (above) and with the new method
(below). As can be seen, the new method signifi-

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Figure 18. The East Mazalij Unayzah play on

the downthrown fault block of the Mazalij
structure. The top of the structure is barren
of the Unayzah.

cantly improves the event continuity and sharpness of the data. Saudi Aramco was awarded a
U.S. patent for this invention in early 2002.

Optimizing Well Placement through

Fuzzy Logic Analysis
For optimal placement of a development well, a
decision-maker is faced with a multitude of
attributes geophysical, geological, and engi-

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neering that have varying degrees of error and

that are related to the drilling objective in varying
extents. These attributes are oftentimes large in
number; thus, qualitatively assessing their relative
impact on the development problem can be laborious, subjective, or worse, erroneous. Saudi
Aramco geoscientists developed a method, based
on fuzzy logic, for integrating all available fragmented pieces of information about the reservoir
(acoustic impedance, net sand estimates, frequency content, inversion error, etc.) to come up with
an objective estimate of the reservoir potential at
each location in the field (Figure 26).
A word or two about fuzzy logic. In contrast
to binary-valued (bivalent) logic, in which a statement can be either true or false, and hence its

truth is ascribed either 0 or 1, multi-valued (multivalent) logic can ascribe any fraction between 0
and 1 to represent the degree of truth of a statement. This is quite a normal extension of bivalent
logic that we humans practice naturally. For
example, we often use sentences like the weather is hot or she is young in the relative sense,
where the truth of such statements spans an
extended gray interval instead of being
absolutely true or false (black or white). The second sentence, for instance, is valid when someone
is 20 or 30 years old. However, it is unequivocally
more valid (more truthful) in the former case.
Therefore, we may say that the statement is true
to degrees of 0.9 and 0.8 in the two cases, respectively. Fuzzy logic represents a natural way to
capture and describe vagueness, uncertainty, and
imperfection in the data, it is intrinsically well
suited to characterizing vague and imperfectly
defined knowledge (a situation encountered in
most geophysical and geological data), and it can
thus yield simple but robust models that can be
utilized (as done here) in developing sophisticated, objective inference systems.

Regularized Neural Networks

In order to obtain accurate estimates of the reservoir properties (e.g. porosity) between the well
locations, neural networks were utilized to extract
the reservoir properties from the seismic trace
(Figure 27). The history of neural network computing goes back to the 1940s, with the introduction of the first neural network computing model.
At the time, neural networks looked promising,
and were expected to solve many problems of the
time. However, interest declined as limitations in
their performance arose. In the early 1980s, how-

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ever, interest renewed, fueled not only by disappointments in classical artificial intelligence methods in solving large, complicated systems, but also
encouraged by many innovations in neural computing; and these days, neural networks have
wide-ranging applications in several fields.
One of the major difficulties with conventional neural networks is that their performance
has been inconsistent due to the significant
amount of parameter tweaking required to
achieve satisfactory results. The reason is that
large networks, trained for a long time, tend to
overfit the data, producing a rough solution that is

not useful as a predictive model. Saudi Aramco

scientists developed an enhanced type of neural
network (regularized neural networks) that
imposes natural smoothness on the solution and
thus alleviates the overfitting problems. Figure 28
shows a blind test in two wells. The regularized
network solution (red) remains stable and close to
the true porosity measured at the well, while the
conventional network prediction (blue) has wild
oscillations around the true solution, reflecting the
overfitting problem. As a whole, the regularized
solution leads to a 22% increased accuracy over
the conventional network output in this area.

Figure 19. Seawater desalination plant in

eastern Saudi Arabia.

Integration
Of course, technology is only useful when utilized
effectively. Therefore, it has always been paramount that technology is absorbed and assimilated within our daily routines, and that proper venues for effective technology integration are established. Among these are several visualization
rooms (Figure 29) that bring together experts from

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Figure 20. Daily gas feed capacity from the 6

Saudi Aramco gas plants. Haradh plant is still
under construction.

Figure 22. Left : Coherence slice from a commercial package. Right : Same slice from Saudi
Aramcos in-house developed DETECT package. Note the clarity of the channels in the
DETECT picture.

Figure 21. Current gas usage by sector in

Saudi Arabia. Electrical power generation and
water energy needs consume approximately
half of the daily gas production in Saudi
Arabia

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Figure 23. Faults and sinkholes appear vividly in a coherence

Figure 24. Subsurface impact craters from geologic time, in a

slice from DETECT.

DETECT slice.

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Figure 25. Top: Seismic section processed by conventional deconvolution.

Bottom: Same section processed by fractal deconvolution. Note clarity and
continuity of the events, especially those marked by the arrows.

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Figure 26. Various geological and geophysical sources of data are integrated
into an estimate of the reservoir potential utilizing an algorithm based on
fuzzy logic.

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Figure 27. Reservoir porosity is estimated between the wells using regularized neural networks. The
result is a geocellular model of the porosity heterogeneity of the reservoir.

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various disciplines (geology, geophysics, engineering, computer science, etc.) to discuss challenges
and problems, analyze them from different perspectives, and prescribe remedies and solutions
that draw from the expertise of the whole group.
These visualization rooms have been an effective
tool of technology integration, and have had a significant impact on our ability to tackle the technical and operational challenges.

Summary
Saudi Aramcos exploration program has proven
the gas potential of the deep Paleozoic reservoirs in the Arabian basin. The program has
added 44 tcf of non-associated gas reserves during the past 8 years in and around the Greater
Ghawar area, with an overall exploration success rate of 54%, having drilled a total of 28
exploration wells resulting in 15 new gas fields.
The program also substantially improved understanding of the Paleozoic geology of the region.
The technical challenges faced, particularly in
deep seismic imaging, have spawned significant
research by Saudi Aramco and its partners in
industry and academia. In fact, the success of
the gas exploration program has prompted a
shift in national strategy to expand the petrochemical industries and rely on gas for power
generation and seawater desalination. It also
encouraged international oil companies to put
forward proposals to participate in the Kingdoms non-associated gas exploration, development, and utilization programs.

Figure 28. In a blind

test, comparison of the
true well porosity
(green), that estimated
by conventional neural
networks (blue), and that
estimated from
regularized neural
networks. The latter
avoids the wild
oscillations of the
conventional solution.

Acknowledgments
The author acknowledges the significant contribution of Muhammad Saggaf, Martin Rademakers, and Abdulkader Afifi for helping with the

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Figure 29. Effective technological integration is key to successful tackling of challenges.

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preparation of this chapter. Scott Mussett and
Nasser Al Maddy are acknowledged for preparing
the graphics. The author also acknowledges all of
the Exploration Organization staff at Saudi Aramco, present and past, for their contribution as well
as the many unpublished internal company reports utilized in this chapter. Thanks is expressed
to the Ministry of Petroleum and Mineral
Resources and the Saudi Arabian Oil Company
(Saudi Aramco) for permission to publish.

References
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McGillivary, J. G., and M. I. Husseini, 1992, The
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