In late 1959 I was at home in France, on local leave from an assignment in Turkey, when I received a call from the personnel department in Paris.

They said, “We have a wonderful assignment for you — rough living conditions, but you will be in charge.” The assignment was in the southern region of Oman and the client, the concession holder, was Dhofar Cities Service. I accepted the posting: there was nothing in southeastern Turkey to hold me back, and in Oman there was the understanding that I would be the boss. From my experience as a field engineer I knew the operational side
of the business, but I knew nothing about accounting or management —
I thought, “How hard can it be?” I knew nothing about Dhofar. It was only later
I discovered that my predecessor, Jim Dunlap, had been there for more than a year and was anxious to be replaced after being held up at gunpoint by Bedouin tribesmen.

I flew to Aden, then a British colony, in the last days of December 1959 and was issued with a visa for Dhofar. After a few days I boarded the DC3 used by Dhofar Cities Service for the 2-hour flight to Salalah, following the southern coast of the Arabian Peninsula. There were twice-weekly flights at the time. The DC3 came from Asmara in Eritrea, where it loaded up with fresh vegetables and halal meat, and then stopped in Aden to collect passengers before flying on to Dhofar. There was a British RAF base in Salalah, the Sultan of Oman having close ties to the British, and Cities Service had permission to use their landing strip.
When we arrived in Oman there was a thorough search by customs officials to prevent the import of alcohol, which was absolutely prohibited.

The Cities Service camps were dry. In working on this recollection I learned that the PDO base camps in the north typically had a bar. I’m glad we didn’t know this at the time — in fact I knew nothing of the Fahud or the other exploration wells drilled in the north. I reported directly to Paris and had nothing to do with Arabian Gulf operations that reported to Bahrain.
The headquarters of Dhofar Cities Service were in Raysut, a few miles south of Salalah, on the coast. Raysut was the port — a small bay — that the company used for shipping in equipment and supplies, mostly from Aden. The remains of a Portuguese fort were situated on a cliff overlooking the bay and the Cities Service camp. The headquarters comprised management and administrative staff, the head geologist, a personnel department, and someone who was responsible for relations with Sultan Said, who stayed at his palace in Salalah most of the time rather than in Muscat. The headquarters also had radio communications with Aden (our only link with the rest of the world) and with operations in the desert areas, south of the Rub Al Khali, the Empty Quarter.

After a stopover in Salalah, there was usually a direct flight to the desert location, either on a DC3 or a light aircraft — it was better to fly over the coastal mountain range rather than drive. There was a road leading over the mountains to the rig sites, but it was bad at the best of times, and for much of the year it was unusable as a result of the khareef — the annual monsoon that blankets the Dhofar region in a sea of mist. On parts of the track leading over the mountains, the steepest parts, railway tracks had been laid so that there was sufficient traction for trucks to get up and down.

On the desert side of the mountains was the main base that was called Midway, as well as the drilling locations and seismic parties. The technical base at Midway stocked all materials and supplies for drilling operations as well as the supplies for the various locations; everything from frozen meat from Australia to trailers to spare parts for cars and trucks. There were even ice cream machines. The supply operation for Cities Service was a model of administrative efficiency.

We were working in remote areas under difficult conditions and living at the rig sites, and the company provided everything for us. Life wasn’t that bad.

The Schlumberger crew comprised Ahmed Ali Mohammed, a pleasant and efficient man from British Somaliland who acted variously as a helper, winchman, driver and mechanic, and myself. We stayed on location with the Cities Service employees. I lived in a small air-conditioned trailer which I also used as an office. The truck and the trailer shop moved with the rig. I reported directly to operations in Paris, which meant 24 hours one way by radio to Aden via Salalah and then by cable to Paris. With luck there was the same turnaround for return correspondence. All things considered, it was nice not to be bothered by management — we had plenty of time to take care of the truck and tools, and although nobody relished the idea of lost time on a job, we weren’t pressured by the thought of losing a hundred thousand dollars for each day lost, which was the situation faced by Schlumberger engineers in some locations.

When I arrived in Oman, Cities Service operated up to three drilling rigs and five seismic parties, but soon afterwards this was reduced to one rig and one party. The staff were all expatriate: drillers, mechanics and geologists were mainly from the United States; catering staff and office clerks were Indian; and the drilling crews were mostly Somalis. They were hardworking people. The working language was English, but there was a Belgian man with the seismic parties who spoke French and so, being French myself, it was nice to engage him in conversation. I also remember an Italian chaplain, based in Aden, who came to Dhofar every 3 months or so to say mass.

There were no Omani employees recruited directly by Schlumberger or by Cities Service — it wasn’t permitted — but we were required to have a compulsory escort of two askaris, or guards, whenever we traveled overland, which was quite often. We used a Land Rover pick-up and distances to or from Midway, or between rig sites, could be up to 200 miles (320 km). The cost of these guards was charged to Schlumberger by Sultan Said, and I have a photograph of them in a Cities Service truck, wielding their rifles and looking quite fierce and very proud. Mind you, I was never sure what they were guarding us from because work went smoothly and I didn’t have to contend with any incident along the lines of that experienced by Jim Dunlap.

In fact, it was extremely rare to encounter anyone from the local Bedouin tribes once you moved inland from the Midway camp. We were operating in areas where the geography and climate made settlement virtually impossible, so apart from the occasional glimpse of tribesmen traveling with their camels and other livestock, there was little interaction with local communities.

The logging jobs were not too difficult, and living on the rig meant that I was on hand whenever a job needed to be done. I usually managed to start the job at dusk, which suited me. We ran the full range of logging tools: microlog, electrical log, gamma and neutron, caliper, thermometer and the old laterolog 7. During the last few months I seem to recall using the dipmeter as well. There were no production tools as we were only logging exploration wells, and we didn’t have combination tools at that time. This meant that we had to run each of the tools individually, one after another. It took a long time but the wells were not excessively deep — maybe 10,000 ft (3,050 m) maximum.

The attitude was relaxed and, if for any reason, there was lost time, the client was very reasonable. Perhaps it was the sense of everyone banding together as a consequence of isolation, but there were no repercussions. I spent time working on the tools, effecting repairs and keeping them maintained. The tools operated largely through mechanical processes and so this was relatively straightforward. Given the remoteness of location, however, it was important that they were maintained because there wasn’t any backup if any of them failed. Cities Service were very efficient in their drilling program, and I frequently moved between the various exploration wells. I logged the Jarf well in March, shortly after my arrival; then I did wells in southwest Marmul followed by Wadi Afar. By the end of the year I was in Haluf followed by Janab, and then for the first part of 1961 I moved to Mazraq before going back to Marmul for the logging of Marmul-2.

By the time I arrived on the scene in 1959 Schlumberger had sent a logging truck — the large blue logging trucks that seem to define a Schlumberger operation — but for the very first logging operation at Dauka-1, an old offshore unit, or skid unit, was used. It was a forerunner of the standard OSC–C unit that Schlumberger once used and it must have already been very old by the time it was shipped out to Oman. It was certainly manufactured before 1950, perhaps quite a few years before, but it still had its uses. I would use it when I needed to spool cable or when I needed to place magnetic marks on cables so that we could accurately gauge depth. It was also a spare winch should anything happen to the winch on the logging truck.

The new logging trucks were very good except for the several days after rainfall when there was the danger of getting stuck in mud. Nobody went anywhere after a rainfall — even the planes couldn’t land until everything had completely dried out.

Basic interpretations of the logs were done on location by hand, by the client, but they were also sent to Houston or elsewhere for more detailed analysis. Marmul had been discovered by the time I arrived in Oman and many other exploration wells drilled, so the geologists already had a good understanding of the subsurface structures. Still, there was always a sense of expectation when we logged a well. We were never totally sure what the measurements would show up.

There was some promise with discoveries at the Marmul exploration wells, for example, but the finds were not of a sufficient flow rate to be commercial. The price of oil at that time was very low, and there would have been the tremendous expense of constructing a pipeline across desert and mountains to Salalah, or wherever else the oil might have to be shipped out from. A pity, given the effort and the expense that went into the exploration, but then again, that’s the nature of the business.

In those days overseas postings were for 30 months without any days off, but with one month of leave after 15 months. Leave was supposed to be taken locally, meaning that we could travel to various places within the general region. I visited East Africa, and I remember that each place had an association with some sort of exotic spice or fragrance. From Dhofar came the fabled frankincense, while in Pemba and Zanzibar there were cloves, and in Mogadishu you could purchase myrrh.

I will always remember my time in Oman as being an unusual posting because of the remoteness of the location. Schlumberger worked in other remote locations, of course, such as the French Sahara, but these tended to be large camps that accommodated many people and had relatively easy access to urban centers. In Dhofar I was the only Schlumberger engineer on site, the overall community was relatively small and we really were extremely isolated. There was nothing there except the rig. And yet I got what was promised, which was to run the show. It was a small show, but I got to run it, and if I had to do it over again, I most certainly would.

Jacques Bonsergent began his career with Schlumberger in 1958 and was posted to Oman in January 1960 as engineer-in-charge, working on wells drilled by the Cities Service concession in Dhofar.

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