The dry hole at Fahud-1 in Oman is famous in the annals of oil exploration as the “unluckiest well in the Middle East.” However, there is another story to be told which, with a different outcome, could have dramatically changed the course of oil development in the country.
Oman opened up to oil exploration in the 1950s. The spotlight fell on the deep gorges (“wadis”) of the Jebel Akhdar mountain range, which were of particular interest to the geologists of Petroleum Development Oman, an offshoot of the Iraq Petroleum Company. They hoped that a close inspection of the wadis’ exposed flanks would shed light on the stratigraphy of the wider region. Wadi Mu’aydin (alternatively spelled “Mi’aidin”), which is situated at the southern end of the mountain, promised to be the most interesting.
Prospector’s Paradise
Although Jebel Akhdar (“Green Mountain” in Arabic) is bordered to the northwest and southeast by green rocks – the famous Semail Ophiolite – it is believed to have taken its name from the lush vegetation of the Saiq Plateau, nestled high in the fold of the mountain. Suleiman bin Hamyar, the self-styled “Lord of Jebel Akhdar,” was the paramount leader of the Bani Riyam, a tribe numbering some 11,000 souls whose territory included the plateau.
Although nominally loyal to the sultan of Oman, Suleiman had ambitions of his own. In 1950, when he met the English traveler Wilfred Thesiger, Suleiman took him aside for a whispered conversation. He said that he wanted recognition as the sovereign ruler of the independent state of Jebel Akhdar. He promised to grant Thesiger access to the mountain if he could assist him in his claim. Thesiger departed, assuming that he would never gain access to the coveted mountain. Later that year, Suleiman approached the British political resident in Sharjah and asked for permission to negotiate an oil concession on the basis that he was an independent ruler.
In a newspaper interview, Suleiman depicted Jebel Akhdar as an oil prospector’s paradise:
“It is just like Lebanon, in winter snows, and in summer flowing rivers and springs and ripe fruit. Verily it is a paradise of the world (…) In some places oil flows on the surface of the earth and the bedouin are accustomed to kindle their fires from it.”
The other player in this scenario was the imam, Muhammad bin Abdullah al-Khalili, to whom many of the central tribes owed allegiance. In 1920, an accommodation had been reached between Muhammad and the sultan by the Treaty of Sib, with each side agreeing not to interfere in the affairs of the other. Oil exploration threatened to upset this arrangement since the imam also claimed a share of any oil that might be found. In 1937, PDO obtained a concession from the sultan, but certain parts of the interior were out of bounds.
Relations between the sultan and imam remained cordial. However, the imam died in May 1954 and Ghalib bin Ali al-Hinai was elected in his place. Ghalib and his younger brother Talib were more assertive in pressing the claims of the imamate. The sultan, however, having landed a military force at Duqm in the south, saw the old imam’s passing as an opportunity to advance into central Oman and allow the geologists to inspect the most promising areas there.
The scene was set for a confrontation. While the sultan and the imam’s forces squared up to each other at Ibri, the geologists visited an anticline 130 kilometers to the southwest of Jebel Akhdar. This was Jebel Fahud (“Leopard Mountain”), a low hogback structure that was considered a good prospect. Drilling began in January 1956.
Knocking on the Door
The civil war ended; Suleiman remained loyal to the sultan and the imam retired to his village in the mountains. For the geologists, Jebel Akhdar remained a challenge – it was a missing piece in the geological jigsaw. They believed they would find exposed rock formations in the steep walls of the wadis of the mountain. And, since those formations were thought to extend to the area of Jebel Fahud, they might reveal more about its stratigraphy and what the drill bit might find on its way down. Only two wadis were considered significant: Wadi Mu’aydin, which formed a gorge behind Suleiman’s fort at Birkat al-Mawz, and Wadi Bani Kharus at Awaiba on the far side of the mountain.
The geologists also wanted to look for boulder beds which might link to the boulder beds of the Haushi formation in an area known as the Hugf, some 210 kilometers to the south. In 1835, a British naval officer, Lieutenant James Wellsted, had reported seeing granite while descending Jebel Akhdar along the Wadi Mu’aydin, raising the intriguing possibility that there might be boulder beds present there. Unfortunately, this expectation arose from someone’s rather imaginative reading of Wellstead’s book – it later transpired that the granites he had seen were Proterozoic glacial deposits in the Cryogenian, more than 350 million years older than the Permo-Carboniferous Haushi granites.
However, accessing the wadis was a problem because they were controlled by Suleiman who (no doubt seeking his own oil concession) refused entry. In the autumn of 1956, the geologists gathered in the shadow of the mountain. My father, Mike Morton, the leader of the party, wrote: “It is hoped to get a representative section below the fault in Birkat al Mauz.” A long and frustrating series of negotiations followed between company representative Stuart Watt and Suleiman but without success, leading Mike to remark with some irritation: “It would appear that the Muscat Government considers geologists to be rather a nuisance.” Meanwhile, Suleiman bided his time, waiting to see which way the wind would blow.
In November 1956, the Suez Crisis intervened, throwing the whole operation into doubt. Once that danger passed, the party split up, with Mike staying with his colleague Tom Jameson in a camp at the southern end of Wadi Semail while Don Sheridan and another geologist, Rodney Collomb, headed south for the Hugf. For the time being, Mike and Tom were confined to sampling along the sides of the nearby wadi.
“We were not allowed to venture more than 100 metres on either side or along in the direction of Muscat,” wrote Tom. “It was a most frustrating period for both of us.”
They found some distractions such as playing cards and practicing cricket to counter the boredom.
The geologists reassembled after the Christmas break and the waiting game resumed. A date for entering Wadi Mu’aydin was provisionally fixed for Jan. 2, then Jan. 9 and finally Jan. 11, 1957. But the omens were not good: when the geologists arrived at the fort, Suleiman was not there. Later, in the afternoon, they were granted a brief audience with the sheikh, and the way seemed clear for a visit to the wadi. As they waited for the arrival of their guides, they sat in the shade of a large tree.
“Time dragged and we started walking to and fro in front of the fort in an attempt to lessen our impatience,” recalled Don Sheridan.
Eventually, the guides arrived, and the party set off, taking their vehicles as far as the rocky terrain would allow. They continued on foot, arriving at a “bat-infested” sheer cliff in the Hawasina formation. The guides told Mike that they had been instructed to take the party no further.
“Mike turned on his heel,” Don wrote, “so furious that he was speechless.”
He stormed back to the cars, and they drove off, barely stopping to eject the guides at the Birkat fort.
No Dragon, No Treasure
The disheartened geologists returned to camp. Suleiman’s refusal to allow full access to the wadi weighed heavily on their minds as negotiations continued. Then, as Mike described, there was a breakthrough:
“Alone in the camp, I was doing the accounts and the monthly report at the end of January. The camp steward came to my tent and announced: ‘Sheikh Suleiman bin Hamyar to see you.’ I went out to find this Omani sheikh, in splendid dress and sporting an impressive beard. ‘I believe you want to see the wadi,’ he said, ‘Come now, and we shall visit.’ I was escorted into the Wadi Mu’aydin by the Lord of the Green Mountain and his son, who kept me covered with a Colt, and although I was not permitted to sample, I could recognize the rock formations I saw.”
It was left to Don Sheridan and a colleague to penetrate the jebel from the Awaiba side. They accomplished that feat by riding on camels and then swimming the last part: “No dragon, no treasure; no castle, no princess; only sunlight and the same jagged, grey-green rocks through which we had passed the previous day … We had swum through the centre of Jebel Akhdar.”
Mike’s visit to Wadi Mu’aydin had afforded only a brief glimpse of the formations, and he was not allowed to return. Had the geologists been given free access to sample and study the stratigraphy in detail, they would have realized that the Natih interval in Fahud-1 was much reduced, truncated by a fault or an unconformity. The Natih formation exposed in Wadi Mu’aydin is more than 300 meters thick, of which only the basal 27 meters was encountered at the ill-fated Fahud-1.
The full formation encountered in Fahud-2, however, is more than 400 meters thick. This was first realized when Shell ran a full seismic survey over the Fahud structure in 1961-2. Oil was encountered in the Natih A Member when Shell drilled Fahud-2 in 1964.
Fahud-1 did not strike oil in significant quantity. At one point a small discharge of oil and gas raised hopes of a larger strike, but the well was dry. Drilling was completed at a depth of 3,760 meters in the Paleozoic evaporites, probably Cambrian, in May 1957.
As wellsite geologist Peter Walmsley wrote:
“Much is made about Fahud-1 being a dry hole and a failure. It did have some minor oil shows in the Wasia Limestone and a consequent drill-stem test produced some gas. Mind you, it was a pretty puny affair for the Middle East; the petroleum engineer actually lit the flare with a match.”
The End of the Show
The geologists had glimpsed the future, and not only in the sense of the region’s petroleum fortunes. On their way to the center of Jebel Akhdar on the Awaiba side, Don Sheridan was surprised to find a cleared road leading up Wadi Bani Kharus – this was a time when motor vehicles were a rarity and donkey tracks the norm. It was likely that the road had been built by rebels importing arms from the coast and Sharjah to their stronghold on the Saiq Plateau in preparation for an uprising against the sultan.
Sure enough, in June 1957, civil war flared up again when the imam’s brother, Talib, returned from exile and persuaded him to resume the title of imam; Suleiman also cast his lot with the rebels. Jebel Akhdar was off-limits to geologists and exploration generally. After the British SAS stormed the mountain in January 1959, the rebels were defeated and Suleiman, the imam and his brother went to live in Saudi Arabia. By then, PDO had shifted its focus to a geophysical prospect at Ghaba in the south, in an area where Don Sheridan had discovered an oil seepage the year before. Meanwhile, Cities-Services had found the Marmul field in Dhofar, even farther to the south.
By 1960, PDO had spent approximately 12 million British pounds (230 million pounds, or $286 million, today) in Oman with little to show for it. The American partners were nervous because any oil discoveries in Oman could jeopardize their Saudi concession; oil prices were low and supply exceeded demand. In the event, four shareholders – BP, Total, Jersey Standard and Mobil – decided to withdraw, leaving Shell (85 percent) and Partex (15 percent) to continue. The reconstituted PDO found commercial oil at Yibal in 1962. Two years later, the company sank the second well at Fahud and struck oil a few hundred meters from the original test well.
The first well had missed striking a six-billion-barrel oilfield by less than a hundred meters.
We now know that the Wadi Mu’aydin has one of the best exposed and most complete sections through the Cretaceous-Permian carbonates overlying the Pre-Cambrian, with cap rocks and reservoir rocks similar to those encountered at Jebel Fahud. A proper examination of those sections might have confirmed the prospects of Fahud had it been allowed. Rudi Jäckli (a former managing director of PDO and geologist) was quoted as saying “that had IPC geologists had the opportunity to study the Oman Mountains more closely … in Wadi Mu’aydin … they might not have abandoned Fahud after only drilling a single well.”
As it happened, the political situation determined the direction and scope of petroleum exploration as much as the geological agenda. Today, all that is in the distant past and visitors can explore Wadi Mu’aydin with a freedom that the early oil finders could scarcely have imagined.
Acknowledgement: The author thanks Alan Heward for his kind assistance with this article.