The Handover Generation
The 50/50 agreement, headquarters moved to Dhahran, Ghawar and Safaniya on stream, and a training system that started producing Saudi engineers.
Aramco Alumni
A private network for the people who built Saudi Aramco — to find each other again, to put on the record how it was actually done, and to be reachable by whoever tries to build something like it next.
Why now
Aramco is ninety-three years old. Nothing about 2026 forces the issue — no round number, no jubilee, no date in the diary. That is precisely the problem. The deadline here is not a date, it is attrition. The people who ran the handover from American to Saudi management between 1973 and 1980, and the first generation the company's own schools produced, are in their seventies and eighties now.
And the handover is the part almost nobody has written down. On 11 May 1940 the company opened a school in a rented house in al-Khobar with nineteen pupils. The Jabal School followed in 1941 for shift workers, with around three hundred enrolled; one of its teachers was Abdul Hafiz Nawwab, the first Saudi college graduate on the payroll, and one of his pupils was a boy called Ali Al-Naimi. Al-Naimi was named the company's first Saudi president in November 1983 and took over from 1 January 1984. Between 1953 and 1963, by the company's own account, the proportion of skilled Saudi workers went from 9 per cent to 57 per cent, and the company gave over roughly an eighth of production time to training.
No other company in the region manufactured its own workforce from scratch and then handed itself over to it. The reserves and the barrels are documented to the decimal place. How that was done — who decided what, in what order, and what it cost — sits in a few hundred heads, most of them retired, and it has no other copy.
Four generations
This is not only for the people who were there in 1980. Every era solved a problem the next one inherited.
The 50/50 agreement, headquarters moved to Dhahran, Ghawar and Safaniya on stream, and a training system that started producing Saudi engineers.
The staged buy-in completed, the 1988 royal decree, the first Saudi president, and a company run entirely by the people it had educated.
Refineries and joint ventures abroad, KAUST, Sadara and SATORP — a national producer becoming a global integrated company.
Abqaiq, the largest IPO ever held, SABIC, Jafurah gas, blue ammonia and AI.
The first two eras — the 1933 concession and the American company that grew out of it — are beyond living memory. Nobody is left to ask about the drilling of Dammam No. 7, and what survives of it survives only in the archive. That is exactly the argument for recording the eras where people are still here.
The expertise we are assembling
A directory is only useful if it is searchable by what someone actually did. These are the areas we are building out first.
Surveying, seismic, mapping and the judgement calls behind where to drill.
Onshore and offshore drilling, completions, well services and workovers.
Field development, recovery, and the simulation work that runs from POWERS to TeraPOWERS.
Gas-oil separation, processing plants, pipelines and megaproject delivery.
Ras Tanura onwards, the downstream joint ventures, and the move into chemicals.
Loading, export terminals, marine operations and the movement of crude to market.
The schools, the Industrial Training Centres and the scholarship pipeline that built the workforce.
Finance, legal, government affairs, planning and the running of the company itself.
Six ways to take part
Most members start with one and add another later. None of them requires you to be looking for anything.
Add your name, your period and your function to the founding directory.
One profile. Thirty minutes.Record one interview about something you built or lived through.
One hour, once.Take occasional paid advisory calls in your area of expertise.
You set the availability.Join an assembled team on a commissioned build.
By mandate, when it suits you.Guide someone earlier in the career you already had.
A few hours a quarter.Name the people who must be in this network, and open the door.
Introductions only.What we promise you
This is the part that matters most, and it is not negotiable.
What we are asking for
Join the founding directory: your period, your function, what you built. Thirty minutes.
Sit for one recorded conversation about something you made happen. It becomes part of the archive.
Name three people who must be in this network — and, if you can, make the introduction.
The founding directory
Members who asked to be listed publicly. Everyone else is here too, privately.
No names yet. The first will appear here as members are approved.
Add your name
Five questions, about ten minutes. Nothing you write here is published — it goes to the directory, private by default.
Aramco Alumni is an independent initiative created by former colleagues. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a property of Saudi Aramco. The Aramco name is used here only to describe who this community is for. If the company chooses to support the project, that relationship will be stated openly on this page.
If you helped build any of this, you belong here — and so do the people you worked with. Please pass the link on.