Saharan Christmas

Happy Holidays Greeting straight from Northern Sahara Desert ! ! !


May your Christmas:

be as bright as the dazzling Saharan sunshine,

be as joyful as those chirping desert birds hovering among the pine trees in our garden nearby,

and be as white as those spots of clouds dotting the Ghani field (my workplace) skyline.


Merry Christmas!!!

Living Among Desert Foxes

In my previous blog entries, I have made many references to Ghani field as my place of work yet I failed to give you sufficient description of it. So for you to have a better understanding of the place where I’m in, here is the blog that will treat you to a virtual tour of Ghani field. Okay, let's proceed.

Ghani field is in the middle of the desert though not like one that resembles a topography normally associated with fine sand dunes. Geographically, its terrain is rough and uneven at the most. Multiple hills in varied sizes constitute the landscape accentuated by low lying areas intermittently surrounded by small ridges. Immediately above one of these low elevations lies the Ghani Main Station or the main processing plant.

By the way, Ghani is just one of the five oil producing sites of the company called Veba, a firm jointly operated by Calgary-based Petro-Canada and the Libyan government-owned National Oil Company. It has one main station and three satellite stations collectively capable of producing 50K bbls/day making it the largest oil producer among the five sites.

Each station functions as processing plant which houses giant machineries, vessels, manifolds, and other equipment required to process the crude oil further. Here, crude oil passes through different stages before flowing into the waiting giant storage tanks in unrefined state, though now ready for pipelining into bigger storage tanks located about 200 miles away in Ras Lanuf terminal by the Mediterranean coast.

Lining up by the side of the main station are work shop buildings. The craftsmen that occupy these structures are the company’s troubleshooters. First is the Communications, the department responsible for telephone lines, radio signals and TV channels. Next is the Technical Maintenance workshop which troubleshoots power plant, power lines, electrical appliances, computers, air-conditioners and everything that has to do with electricity. The third building is the Production workshop which serves as the home base for welders, sandblasters, painters, unskilled laborers, etc. Next to this building is the Garage workshop where all pick-up trucks and cars are sent for repair. The petrol station in the front yard is also under the garage section’s responsibility. The last workshop called General Maintenance handles all kinds of generators and compressors.

Strewn all over Ghani field with a distance reaching as far as 30 miles in diameter are oil wellheads feeding the four stations with crude oils sucked from way beneath the desert surface. The wellheads are equipped with either Lumpkin pump (the most familiar as it has this image of a metal beam moving up and down), Water Injection Pump or Submersible Pump mechanisms as a means to easily extract the crude oil from beneath the earth surface. Multiple pipes and an array of manifolds serve as the flow lines between the wellheads and the stations.

Located about a mile away from the main station, in small plateau a little bit higher in elevation than the main station’s is the accommodation camp. I appreciate the very person who did the planning of this area for his good foresight by choosing the camp’s ideal location with a very good view of the plant site and the camp’s immediate environs.

The camp occupies about 20 hectares of flat land with a cluster of 14 accommodations blocks(concrete & otherwise)each containing 20 rooms, and five assembled trailers containing two rooms each. Construction of two more concrete blocks of the same capacity is underway and this will bring to a total of 16 blocks upon completion.

Each room measures at an average of 4 by 4 meters in floor size and has its own bath room, bed, air-conditioning system, cupboard, portable refrigerator and telephone. Subscription to Satellite TV channels is paid for by the company though each individual employee has to provide his own TV set. Here in Ghani you can watch Marimar (Filipino soap) for free, haha. (I occupy one of the rooms in trailer block though the rooms here are smaller in size but they are just as nice since they are equipped with the same facilities and household equipment as those in concrete blocks.

The camp has efficient potable water facilities that would make the officers of Manila’s water companies die of envy. As for electricity, the camp’s power supply comes from giant generators powered by four Tornado and two Ruston turbines fueled by diesel and gas extracted from crude oil. The camp also has two large standby Caterpillar gensets utilized when power outage occurs.

Aside from free lodging, the company also provides free (but not so good due to the same weekly menu being repeated many times over) meals, laundry service and medical assistance to its employees. A building about 20 meters away from the accommodation blocks houses the mess hall and laundry room. Not far away on the left side is the Ghani clinic with two doctors working alternately after every one month.

As for recreation, there are sport facilities comprising tennis court, swimming pool, basketball court and football field. The recreation club houses billiard and snooker tables. The new and bigger recreation club whose construction is to begin soon will feature a mini-cinema and a gymnasium.

Standing beside the mess hall building and fronting the main parking area is the main office building. This is the place where the Area Superintendent (the field’s chief executive) and I, his secretary, hold office. A two storey structure, this building also houses such major departments as Operations (Production, Technical and General Maintenance), Reservoir and Production Engineering, Drilling, Area Facilities Engineering, and the Radio Room.

My brother Benjoe, by the way, is one of the three Radio/Telephone Operators manning the Radio Room. His job, among other things, is to give weather information to pilots during aircraft’s take-off and landing.

Along the main road heading to main station about half a mile from main office building is the Fire Station building. Officially called Loss Prevention and Environment Department, the fire station has one Mercedes and one Kenworth fire trucks. It also has its own accommodation block for the exclusive use of the whole fire station crew. The Pinoy crews here cook their own meal, Filipino style, so I visit them once in a while or more specifically when I’m invited to come for a drink and dinner.

As regards transport, the Ghani Airport is located about 15 miles away. The company’s 50-seater Dash-8 and the two small Twin Otters land here every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday transporting the employees in and out of Ghani field. Pick-up trucks, mostly Land Cruisers, numbering in more than a hundred are the local means of transport.

Bye for now.