Saudi Aramco is the state-owned oil company of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As the world’s top exporter of crude oil and natural gas liquids, Saudi Aramco’s economic and political influence has been widely note throughout the globe. The petroleum industry has long be synonymous with economic prosperity, but there are many other ways in which Aramco’s shaped the world.

-Three signatures changed the world’s relationship with petroleum forever.

In 1933, King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Al Sa’ud, along with Shaikh ‘Abdullah Al-Sulayman and Lloyd Hamilton, signed a concession agreement authorizing Standard Oil of California, now known as Chevron, to explore for oil in Saudi Arabia.

Since then, Aramco has discovered an unprecedented amount of energy reserves — which includes the “field of dreams” Ghawar, the world’s largest known oil field, and Safaniya the world’s largest offshore field. These findings sparked the rapid transformation of Saudi Arabia from desert kingdom to modernized global power.

-No matter where you live on planet earth, you’ve come in contact with Saudi’s petroleum products.

Saudi Aramco is the largest single producer of crude oil in the world. The company ships more oil around the world than any other single company or country. About 1 out of every 10 barrels of oil around the globe originated from Saudi Aramco.

-Saudi Aramco eradicated malaria from the eastern part of the country.

When oil explorers arrived, malaria was widespread throughout the region. In the early 1940’s, Aramco began educating residents about preventing the illness. The company also introduced minnows to eat mosquito larvae within the irrigation canals. In addition, Aramco used ddt to combat the pests and by the 1950’s the disease had disappeared from the region.

-Aramco added English words to Saudi spoken Arabic.

English terms used in the workplace became part of spoken Arabic within the region. For example, the word weyt, which means “tank”. The tanker trucks used to transport water to workers in Ras Tanura were white, so all tanks became known as ‘weyt’.

Another example is the word wanayt, or pick-up truck. All Aramco pickups had serial numbers on their doors that started with 1-8, or “one-eight,” and it was Arabicized to wanayt.

-The green lawns in Dhahran’s residential camp came from Egypt.

Today, the Dhahran residential camp is known for its greener appearance, but that wasn’t always the case. In 1947, a woman named Paula Weathers joined her husband in Dhahran with Bermuda grass from Egypt. She carried it in a coffee can and planted it when she arrived. That grass became Dhahran’s first lawn, and was later transplanted to nearly every home in the camp.

For more interesting facts about Aramco, please visit http://www.saudiaramco.com/en/home/about/history.html

*This author is not an authorized representative of Saudi Aramco, nor makes any claim as such. These facts are stated as provided by public company publications.

 Photos from Ayesha Malik’s book Above the Oilfields