OPINION

OPINION | RICHARD MASON: Warm memories of the Sahara

During my work with Exxon as a well site geologist, I spent two-thirds my time in the Libyan Sahara Desert on drilling rigs, examining samples of rock drilled every 10 feet, and if I thought the rocks might be oil-bearing, I stopped the drilling and ran a test.

What made it complicated was that many layers of drilled rocks had traces of oil, and every test would cost the company $100,000. If you didn't get oil on those extra tests, you could receive a "Your services are no longer needed" note.

But my time in the desert wasn't spent just looking at rock samples. In any drilling operation there are hours of down time, especially for geologists.

In Libya there is a thick layer of rocks called the Heira Shale. It takes days to drill through it. That's when my day's work would finish in 30 minutes and my morning report would say, "TD 8050', drilling, 100 percent Heira Shale, black, splintery, shale" and that would be it until the next day.

Then, when the drilling bits became dull, the bit would have to be pulled, and replacing it would usually take six to eight hours. That's when I would gas up the Land Rover.

When you're driving in the desert, you realize it's not barren, trackless, and filled with sand dunes. Since the desert was once an inland sea and later a lush African forest, and had seen countless armies march across it, remnants of all those things are still there.

Almost two-thirds of it is called hard-pack, and it's like driving on a flat gravel road. All you have to do is not drive off into a wadi (a former stream bed) or over a large sand dune (which make up less than a quarter of the desert), where you would get stuck.

You can still see the tread marks of German and British tanks from World War II. German jerry cans dot the desert. When we were near the coast, we were warned not to drive off the cleared posted road near the well site, where the Germans and English planted several million land mines, which are still active.

On the low ridges near the coast there were machine-gun nests which looked as if the soldiers manning them had just left. One of the oil companies hired some ex-German soldiers to clear land mines, who had maps of where the mines had been placed.

I traveled by dashboard compass, and when driving cross-desert I would sometimes read a book propped up on the steering wheel. That compass driving didn't always work. I once ran into a sandstorm, was lost for 12 hours, and had to spend the night in my Land Rover.

But driving in the desert always turned up surprises, such as a World War I biplane that had crashed and burned. The metal remains were lying on top of a small ridge.

I once drove to the Kufra Oasis, where I sat in the sand around a steaming pot of vegetables and camel meat and lunched with the village heads. Then I drove down to see an American bomber, the Lady Be Good. The World War II plane had been hit by anti-aircraft fire that disabled its navigation system. When its fuel supply was depleted, the crew bailed out and the plane glided down and landed.

It was still intact except for bent props and collapsed landing gear. The remains of the crew were found in the mid-1950s. They had all survived the bailing out, but trying to walk across several hundred miles of desert was too much for them.

For a geologist, the desert is a treasure trove, such as glistening gypsum fossils lying in the dry stream beds. Those kept me busy for hours on end, and the rock walls on the sides of the stream beds had scratched-out pictures of animals. These petroglyphs were from a prehistoric time when the climate was much wetter; at one time Libya was called the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

As I reflect on our two years in Libya, I consider them a somewhat pleasant part of a hardship tour. Vertis has a completely different view, and for good reason. After the Second World War, Benghazi had an influx of residents, and the electrical system couldn't handle the load. That meant one quarter of the town would have its electricity cut off each night. Vertis had to lock her doors, bolt the windows, and couldn't leave the house. We had a shortwave radio, and when President Kennedy was assassinated, she sat in the dark and listened to his funeral on the BBC.

One of my last desert tours was to a remote wildcat in western Libya near the Algerian border. It was 800 miles from Benghazi, and I spent 23 days on a French rig with one other American, a French roughneck crew, and a bunch of Libyan roustabouts.

It was in the red sand area of the Sahara Desert, which at one time held the world record for the world's hottest temperature: 136 degrees. The dunes in the area had a soft red hue due to iron oxide in the sand, which soaked up the sun's energy and held it. In other parts of the Sahara, the white sand dunes reflect the sun's rays, and it cools down at night.

It was by far the most interesting of the desert tours, and since the beat-up French rig stayed broken down a lot, I had plenty of time to see some of the western Sahara, which was more varied and different than the central and eastern Sahara.

The French rig had a French chef, and outside of squid in its own ink sauce, the food was head and shoulders above the standard fare on the American rigs in the area south of Benghazi. Since we were drilling in a different geologic basin, the rock formations were different, and that made the sample work more interesting.

I was the geologist in charge of evaluating and testing the well, and the other American was the drilling engineer.

The two men responsible for drilling and evaluating a multimillion-dollar Exxon wildcat had both graduated from Norphlet High School. Go figure.

Email Richard Mason at richard@gibraltarenergy.com.

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