Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization

by Ed Conway

Berg had discovered the southern point of what was later called the Ghawar field. It is so vast that it took geologists many years to realise that a well they struck more than a hundred miles north was actually drilling into the very same reservoir. The field stretches 175 miles north to south and 19 miles across; when you see it on a map it looks a little like a ballet dancer’s stretched leg. Here in Saudi they call this anticline “En Nala”—the slippers. Many oilfields have been discovered both before and since, but nothing like Ghawar. There is a category given to fields with proven reserves of more than 500 million barrels of oil: giants. Then there are those with 5 billion or more: the super-giants. Ghawar is bigger than any super-giant ever discovered before or since. Its precise size is still debated today—and indeed it is ever-changing as more reserves of oil and gas are discovered—but it has already produced more than 70 billion barrels of oil and has around 50 billion more still available underground. It belongs in a category of its own: not a giant or a super-giant but perhaps, as some have called it, an elephant—or rather the elephant, since we will almost certainly never discover another place quite like it.