Saudi Aramco · 29 May 1933 — 2026
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In May 1933 a state with almost no revenue signed away the right to look for oil under its eastern desert, to geologists most people thought were wasting their time. Ninety-three years later the company produces 12.9 million barrels of oil equivalent a day.
Concession signed 29 May 1933 First oil Dammam No. 7, March 1938 Listed 11 Dec 2019 Production 12.9 mmboed, 2025
On 29 May 1933, at Khuzam Palace in Jeddah, the Kingdom's Minister of Finance Abdullah Al-Sulaiman and a Standard Oil of California attorney named Lloyd N. Hamilton signed a concession to look for oil in the Eastern Province. Harry St John Philby had kept the talks from collapsing that spring. Saudi Arabia had opened at a hundred thousand gold pounds and settled nearer fifty. It was not a large sum, and at the time it was not obvious anyone would ever get it back.
Survey parties came ashore on the Gulf coast at Jubail — sources put the first landing somewhere in 1933 or 1934 — and were guided across the Eastern Province by Khamis bin Rimthan of the Ajman, who navigated by stars and terrain. They drilled the Dammam dome. Wells one to five disappointed. By the spring of 1937 the venture looked like the failure the sceptics had predicted, and drilling had been grinding away at No. 7 since the previous December.
Max Steineke, the chief geologist, stopped the work and remapped the region east to west. Then he told the drillers to go deeper. In the first week of March 1938 — the sources give 3 or 4 March — Dammam No. 7 came in commercially at 1,441 metres, roughly twice the depth of the wells that had failed, at about 1,585 barrels a day. They called it the Prosperity Well. Commercial production was formally declared that October.
That is the story the company tells, and it is the wrong story, or at least an incomplete one. The oil was going to be found by somebody. The more consequential decision came two years later, when 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 named Ali Al-Naimi, who by 1 January 1984 was running the company. By the company's own account, skilled Saudis went from 9 per cent of the workforce to 57 per cent between 1953 and 1963, and roughly an eighth of production time was given over to training.
What follows is the ninety-three years around those two decisions — the concession and the classroom. It includes the strike at Ras Tanura in 1945, the embargo the company had to implement against its own American parents in 1973, the drilling of the largest oil fields ever found, the slow transfer of ownership from four American companies to the Saudi state, the largest share sale in history, and the morning in September 2019 when a projectile attack took 5.7 million barrels a day off the market. All of it is one story.
Era I
1933 — 1938
A gamble by SOCAL geologists on a country nobody believed held oil, rescued by one man's insistence on drilling deeper than the failures.
1933·05·29Jeddah
Abdullah Al-Sulaiman, Minister of Finance, for Saudi Arabia; Lloyd N. Hamilton for the Standard Oil Company of California. Harry St John Bridger Philby kept the negotiations from collapsing that spring. The Kingdom had opened at 100,000 gold pounds and settled nearer 50,000.
1933·07·07
SOCAL incorporates the California Arabian Standard Oil Company — CASOC — to hold the concession.
1934Jubail
Khamis bin Rimthan of the Ajman, who navigated by stars and terrain, begins guiding the exploration crews. Accounts of the first landing differ: 1933 is widely repeated, but Saudipedia dates the first survey team's arrival at Jubail to 3 October 1934 and AramcoWorld's own account puts the geologists in 1934.
1936
US$21m in cash and deferred payments plus marketing rights east of Suez, for 50 per cent of CASOC. Max Steineke is appointed chief geologist in Arabia, a post he holds until 1946.
1937Dhahran
He will run the company twenty-two years later.
1937 · spring
Dammam wells one to five have disappointed and No. 7 has been under way since December 1936. He remaps east to west, then tells the drillers to go deeper.
1938·03Dammam No. 7
Commercial oil at 1,441 metres in the Arab Zone carbonates — roughly twice the depth of the earlier failures — at an initial rate of about 1,585 barrels a day. Sources give 3 or 4 March; the company's own accounts say 4 March. Commercial production is formally declared on 16 October.
Era II
1939 — 1950
Wartime survival, Ras Tanura, the first schools for Saudi employees, the discovery of Ghawar, and the 50/50 agreement that reset the terms of the trade across the Middle East.
1939·05·01Ras Tanura
With the 69-kilometre Dammam–Ras Tanura pipeline just finished, the King travels to Dhahran and personally loads the tanker D. G. Scofield — the first Saudi crude export. A supplemental concession enlarges CASOC's acreage by a third. The payroll that year is 3,178 Saudis, 322 Americans and 141 others.
1940·05·11al-Khobar
The company's first school opens — the start of the training system that will manufacture the Saudi workforce, and in time the Saudi management.
1940 — 1941
The refinery opens at 3,000 barrels a day and shuts within six months as the war cuts off materials. It restarts in 1941 and is rebuilt to 58,000 bpd by 1945. Abqaiq is discovered in the same period — the field that will anchor Saudi processing for eighty years.
1941
Around 300 enrolled. Its teachers include Abdul Hafiz Nawwab, the first Saudi college graduate to join the company, who taught a young Ali Al-Naimi.
1944·01·31
Aramco, under president F. A. Davies. The name was suggested by the State Department adviser Herbert Feis.
1945Ras Tanura · Dhahran
One of the strikes of the American decades. It is part of the record and is rarely part of the anniversary material.
1948
The Ain Dar structure that Steineke, Barger and Ernie Berg had inferred years earlier from a bend in the Wadi al-Sahba. Sources conflict on the date — 1948 is the geological literature's figure, other accounts give 1951 or 1957, which appear to be the on-stream and confirmation dates. That December, Standard Oil of New Jersey takes 30 per cent and Socony-Vacuum 10 per cent, giving Aramco the capital to build at scale.
1950Sidon
The Trans-Arabian Pipeline runs 1,212 kilometres from the Eastern Province to Sidon — the longest in the world at the time. A subsidised home-loan programme for Saudi employees begins the same year. By the company's own account, production had passed 500,000 barrels a day in 1949, with a new Ras Tanura refinery lifting capacity to 127,000 bpd.
1950·12·30
Signed after pressure from King Abdulaziz. It reset the economics of Middle East oil, and it is the first point at which the state is a party to the company's results rather than a landlord collecting rent.
Era III
1951 — 1972
Ghawar and Safaniya on stream, headquarters moved from New York to Dhahran, and a training machine that started manufacturing Saudi engineers faster than the company could absorb them.
1951
Safaniya remains the largest offshore oil field ever found. Aramco's own corporate history dates the discovery to 1951; AramcoWorld dates it to 1957, which is the year production began. The inconsistency sits inside the company's own published material.
1952Dhahran
New York keeps recruitment and procurement; everything else goes to Dhahran. Max Steineke dies at Los Altos, California on 13 April, aged 54. The company names the Dhahran guest house Steineke Hall.
1953
Hired as a boy in the late 1940s — the sources disagree on the year — and taught in the company's own schools. Thirty-one years later he will be its president.
1953
The first university-educated Saudi woman on the payroll. In the same year Saudi and Palestinian employees strike over pay and conditions.
1953 — 1963
139 schools over fifty years, and the launch of the company magazine. Over this decade, by the company's own account, skilled Saudi workers rise from 9 per cent of the workforce to 57 per cent, with roughly an eighth of production time given over to training. These are corporate figures; no independent corroboration was located.
1957
50,000 barrels a day from 18 wells. Ghawar is confirmed in this period as the largest onshore field in the world. Crude production passes one million barrels a day in 1958, again on the company's own figures.
1959
Abdullah H. Al-Tariki becomes one of the first two Saudis elected to the Aramco board. Tom Barger becomes president, and chief executive from 1961, retiring in 1969 after 32 years; the sources differ on the exact dates of the American leadership sequence.
1960
He is instrumental in the founding of OPEC that year, after Jersey Standard cut posted prices without consulting the producing governments.
1963·09·23
Established by royal decree — the first in the Middle East. The first 67 students enrol exactly a year later, on 23 September 1964. It becomes a university in 1975 and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals in 1986.
1971
He joined in 1947. Average production has reached 4.49 million barrels a day; cumulative production passed five billion barrels in 1962.
The oil was always going to be found by somebody. The schools were a choice.
Era IV — 1973 to 1988
Era IV
1973 — 1988
Embargo, a staged buy-in from a quarter of the company to all of it, and a first Saudi president the company's own schools had educated. This is the era with the most people still alive to describe it, and the least written down.
1973
A participation framework is agreed at OPEC in Vienna, where Saudi Arabia negotiates for 25 per cent against the 20 the Americans had offered. Frank Jungers becomes chief executive, and will have to run the company through the embargo it is about to implement.
1973·10·16Kuwait City
From US$3.01 to US$5.12 a barrel.
1973·10·19
A total halt on oil to the United States. Ahmed Zaki Yamani is summoned to the Riyassa Palace to execute it. The company implementing it is still majority-owned by four American corporations.
1974
The embargo ends on 18 March. Crude has gone from around US$3 to around US$12 in five months.
1974·09·01
Faysal al-Bassam takes Public Relations. Aramco Services Company is established the same year, moving the US support function from New York to Houston, and the first University of Petroleum and Minerals graduates begin arriving. By 1977 the training machine is running 5,799 employees through Industrial Training Centres, 12,818 through 47 on-the-job programmes and 833 through management training, with 500 Saudis already supervising.
1978
The last American to run the company. Yamani had already secured American agreement in principle to sell the remaining interest, reached at Panama in March 1976 and effective from 1980.
1980
Not a single event: a framework agreed in 1972, a quarter taken in 1973, sixty per cent in 1974, an agreement in principle at Panama in 1976, and formal completion taking effect in 1980. The Master Gas System comes into operation the same year; the East–West NGL pipeline follows in 1981, turning Yanbu into an industrial city.
1984·01·01
Named in November 1983 and in post from the first of January. Hired as a boy, taught in the company's own schools, then sent to the American University of Beirut, to Lehigh for a geology degree in 1962, and to Stanford. By 1984 Saudis hold two senior vice-president posts, 17 vice-president and executive-director posts and 14 general managerships.
1988
King Fahd bin Abdulaziz incorporates Saudi Aramco by royal decree. No source consulted gives the decree number or a date within the year. Al-Naimi becomes the first Saudi president and chief executive; Hisham Nazer becomes chairman.
1988·11·10
Formed with Texaco, operating from 1 January 1989 — the company's first large downstream position in the United States, and the beginning of buying its way into its own customers.
Era V
1989 — 2018
Refineries in Korea, China, the Philippines, Greece and Texas; Sadara, SATORP and KAUST. A national oil company turning itself into a global integrated one, run entirely by people it had educated.
1990 — 1991
Aramco evacuates dependants and lifts output to roughly 8.5 million barrels a day to cover the lost supply.
1991
Company teams recover 1.2 million barrels. The clean-up is a part of the operating history that the milestone lists tend to leave out.
1991 — 1996
35 per cent of Ssangyong Oil Refining in South Korea in 1991, later S-Oil; 40 per cent of Petron in the Philippines in 1994; 50 per cent of Motor Oil (Hellas) Corinth Refineries in Greece in 1995–96. Inside the Kingdom, Samarec is dissolved into Saudi Aramco in June 1993, followed within weeks by the Petromin assets, making the company fully integrated at home.
1995
Al-Naimi becomes Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources on 2 August, a post he holds until 7 May 2016. Jum'ah, who joined in 1968, becomes president and chief executive. Sources disagree on the month of the handover; it was in the second half of 1995.
1998 — 2000
Motiva Enterprises is formed with Shell and Texaco in the United States in 1998; the Research and Development Centre is built at Dhahran in 2000. In-house POWERS reservoir simulation, first running in 1997, becomes GigaPOWERS in 2010 and TeraPOWERS in 2016.
2007Quanzhou
FREP is China's first ten-million-tonne integrated refining and chemicals joint venture. In the same period Al-Naimi chairs the Aramco team charged with building the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, with Nadhmi Al-Nasr leading the project; ground is broken in October 2007 and 178 scholarships are awarded in January 2008.
2009·01·01
He joined the company in 1979.
2009·09·23
400 students from over 60 countries and a US$10bn endowment — a research university built and delivered by an oil company. It is the clearest modern echo of the 1940 schoolroom.
2011·10
Formed with Dow, with over US$20bn invested. First plant on stream 2014, mixed-feed cracker 2015, full commercial operation 2017. King Salman inaugurates it, together with the 400,000 bpd SATORP refinery built with Total, at Jubail on 29 November 2016. SATORP's construction ran at 65 per cent Saudisation across 45,000 workers.
2015·09·18
With the company since 1982. Al-Falih moves to the chairmanship and the health ministry in May 2015, and becomes Minister of Energy, Industry and Mineral Resources on 7 May 2016 while remaining chairman.
2017·03·07Port Arthur
Aramco and Shell finalise the split; Aramco's Saudi Refining takes the Motiva name and the 600,000 bpd refinery outright. King Salman Energy Park near Buqayq is announced in 2018 and receives its operating licence in 2021.
Era VI
2019 — 2026
Abqaiq in flames, the largest share sale ever held, SABIC, Jafurah gas, blue ammonia and an artificial-intelligence business. In seven years the company opened its books, then its ownership, then its balance sheet.
2019·04
US$12bn raised against orders of more than US$100bn — and the first public disclosure of audited accounts and field-level reserves. The prospectus reveals that Ghawar's maximum rate is 3.8 million barrels a day, well below what markets had assumed. On 2 September, Yasir O. Al-Rumayyan, governor of the Public Investment Fund, replaces Al-Falih as chairman, separating the ministry from the company ahead of the listing.
2019·09·14Abqaiq · Khurais
Projectiles start fires at both plants and suspend 5.7 million barrels a day — the single largest supply interruption in history. There are no injuries. On 17 September Nasser states that Khurais resumed within 24 hours, that Abqaiq is at 2 million bpd, that full capacity will return by the end of the month, and that not a single shipment to an international customer has been or will be missed.
2019·12·11Tadawul
Announced on 3 November, bookbuilt from 17 November at SAR 30–32 for 1.5 per cent of the company and priced at SAR 32 on 5 December. Three billion shares raise US$25.6bn at a US$1.7 trillion valuation; the stock rises 10 per cent on day one and closes the week near US$1.88 trillion. A greenshoe of 450 million shares on 12 January 2020 lifts the total to US$29.4bn.
2020·06·17
Acquired from the Public Investment Fund for SAR 259.125bn — about US$69.1bn. The previous December the company had completed the purchase of 17 per cent of Hyundai Oilbank for around US$1.2bn.
2020·09·27
Forty tonnes shipped to Japan with IEEJ, SABIC and Mitsubishi, announced by the chief technology officer Ahmad O. Al-Khowaiter.
2021
49 per cent of a new crude pipeline company goes to an EIG-led consortium for US$12.4bn in June, and 49 per cent of Aramco Gas Pipelines Company to a BlackRock Real Assets and Hassana consortium for US$15.5bn on 6 December. On 23 October, Al-Rumayyan and Nasser declare an ambition of net-zero Scope 1 and 2 emissions by 2050 across wholly owned operated assets; the Kingdom's own target is 2060.
2023
Aramco Digital is established in January, with Tareq Amin appointed chief executive in October. In the same year the company buys Valvoline's global products business, takes a minority stake in MidOcean Energy — its first international LNG position — acquires 10 per cent of Rongsheng Petrochemical, agrees to buy Chile's Esmax, and awards around US$11bn of contracts for the Amiral complex.
2024·01·30
The Ministry of Energy directs Aramco not to raise maximum sustainable capacity to 13 million barrels a day but to hold it at 12 million — a strategic reversal. Two weeks earlier the venture capital programme had been expanded to US$7.5bn: Aramco Ventures at US$7bn, including Prosperity7 and a US$1.5bn sustainability fund, plus Wa'ed Ventures at US$500m.
2025·03·04
With the 2024 results, the performance-linked dividend collapses from US$43.1bn to a guided US$900m for 2025, cutting total 2025 distributions to around US$85bn from over US$124bn. A secondary offering of 1.545 billion shares had raised more than US$11.2bn in June 2024.
2025·10·28
Aramco and the Public Investment Fund agree that Aramco will take a significant minority holding in the Saudi artificial-intelligence company, pooling both institutions' AI assets and talent. On 19 November the company signs 17 memoranda and agreements with US companies worth over US$30bn, covering LNG, financial services and advanced materials.
2025·12Jafurah
Jafurah — the largest shale gas development outside North America — begins production, and the Tanajib Gas Plant starts up. Jafurah targets 2 billion standard cubic feet a day of sales gas and around 630,000 barrels a day of liquids by 2030.
2026·02·28
US and Israeli strikes on Iran precipitate a crisis in the Strait, and a naval blockade follows. Saudi Arabia redirects crude west. The wider conflict is outside the scope of this account; its effect on the company is not.
2026·03·10
FY2025 results: adjusted net income around US$104.7bn, total distributions US$85.5bn, capital expenditure US$52.2bn, and a buyback of up to US$3bn over 18 months. Reported and adjusted net income differ by roughly US$11bn; the figure above is the adjusted measure.
2026·05·10
Seven million barrels a day through the East–West crude pipeline to Yanbu. Q1 adjusted net income is US$33.6bn. Nasser calls the pipeline a critical supply artery helping to mitigate a global energy shock, while conceding it cannot replace the lost Hormuz capacity.
2026·08·04
Q2 adjusted net income is US$33.4bn, taking the half-year to US$67.2bn. Nasser says the company continued to demonstrate its ability to maintain business continuity through an unprecedented supply disruption. Zuluf and the Fadhili expansion remain on track for 2026–27; PRefChem is divested to Petronas.
Ninety-three years, fifteen names
Every account of this company, including this one, runs on the same handful of names. Fifteen people cannot have built ninety-three years of anything. Aramco has employed hundreds of thousands, and the great majority of what it knows was never attached to a name at all — it belongs to the drillers, the operators, the schoolteachers, the engineers who came out of the company's own classrooms and the people who trained them. That is the case for an alumni network rather than another corporate history.
Dates for the American leadership sequence before 1980 differ between sources and should be treated as indicative. Al-Naimi's own start date is given variously as 1945, 1947 and 1950; the company's schools are the one detail every account agrees on.
The company, in figures
Figures as published by Saudi Aramco in its 2025 Annual Report and the data tables of its 2025 Sustainability Report. Headcount, nationality and Saudisation counts are scoped to wholly owned in-Kingdom operated assets; the group-wide figure, including SABIC and the international subsidiaries, is materially larger. Reserves are the company's, not the Kingdom's.
Why this is urgent without being an anniversary
Ninety-three is not a number anyone marks. No jubilee is coming, no film is commissioned, no dinner is booked. That is the reason this has never been done, and it is also the reason it is late.
The people who ran the handover — who sat on the Saudi side of the participation talks, who took over departments from Americans who had run them for thirty years, who came out of the Jabal School and the Industrial Training Centres and ended up supervising the men who had taught them — were in their thirties and forties in the 1970s. They are in their seventies and eighties now.
Almost none of what is in this timeline was written down by the people who did it. The reserves are audited, the barrels are counted, the annual report runs to hundreds of pages. What is missing is the method: how a company teaches a workforce it does not yet have, how ownership is transferred without stopping production, what was argued about before Aramco Services was set up in Houston, which calls were wrong. That knowledge exists in a few hundred heads. It has no other copy.
The first two eras on this page are already gone. Nobody is left to ask about Dammam No. 7.
Identify and reconnect the builders across all four living generations — exploration, drilling, reservoir, projects, refining, marine, training and corporate.
One structured hour each. Not nostalgia — method. What was decided, what it cost, and what they would do differently.
Tagged to a person, a period, a function and a field or facility, so that the next state trying to build an industry from nothing can actually find the answer.
Compiled from Saudi Aramco's own published history, annual reports, sustainability data tables and results releases; Tadawul filings and market data; AramcoWorld and the Arabian Sun; Reuters and other contemporaneous news coverage; and standard reference works on the industry. Where sources disagree — notably on Ghawar's discovery date, the reserves figure, the date the first geologists landed, and the exact sequence of the American leadership — the account here gives the range rather than picking a side.
This is an independent alumni project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a property of Saudi Aramco.