Shaybah, also called as Zararah,
is a settlement dominated by a major
crude oil production oil site, the
Shaybah oil field
Shaybah Oil Field is a super-giant disputed oil field under the control of Saudi Arabia and is located in the northern edge of the Rub' Al-Khali/Empty Quarter desert. It is located about 10 km south of the border to Abu Dhabi (Emirate), Abu ...
, in
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in Western Asia. It covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula, and has a land area of about , making it the fifth-largest country in Asia, the second-largest in the A ...
, located approximately from the northern edge of the
Rub' Al-Khali
The Rub' al KhaliOther standardized transliterations include: / . The ' is the assimilated Arabic definite article, ', which can also be transliterated as '. (; ar, ٱلرُّبْع ٱلْخَالِي (), the "Empty Quarter") is the sand des ...
("Empty Quarter") desert. It is about south of the border to
Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates
The United Arab Emirates (UAE; ar, اَلْإِمَارَات الْعَرَبِيَة الْمُتَحِدَة ), or simply the Emirates ( ar, الِْإمَارَات ), is a country in Western Asia ( The Middle East). It is located at t ...
, which is a straight line drawn in the desert. It is south of the eastern part of Abu Dhabi's
Liwa Oasis
The Liwa Oasis ( ar, وَاحَـة لِـيْـوَا, Wāḥḥat Līwā) is a large oasis area in the Western Region of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates.
Geography
Liwa Oasis is about south of the Persian Gulf coast ...
.
Climate
Shaybah's weather is extreme, with the temperature dropping to 0 degrees Celsius on winter nights, rising to around 50 degrees Celsius in the summer daytime. Annual rainfall is less than 3 cm per year.
Transportation
Airport
Shaybah Airport
Shaybah Airport is a small airfield located in the remote Shaybah oil complex in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. The airport is adjacent to the employees accommodation compound.
Overview
The airport was built and is operated by the Saudi A ...
, a small airport serving the oil facilities, is used exclusively by Saudi Aramco. It provides flights to
Dammam,
Al-Hasa,
Jeddah and
Riyadh
Riyadh (, ar, الرياض, 'ar-Riyāḍ, lit.: 'The Gardens' Najdi pronunciation: ), formerly known as Hajr al-Yamamah, is the capital and largest city of Saudi Arabia. It is also the capital of the Riyadh Province and the centre of th ...
.
Industry
Oil was discovered with Shaybah Well No. 1 in 1967, and 30 vertical field delineation wells had been drilled by 1974. However, due to the very large number of wells required to achieve a minimum capacity of 250,000 bd of commercial production, the field was not developed at that time. Starting in 1993 with the advent of extended reach horizontal wells and geo-steering in Saudi Aramco, a detailed evaluation of the productivity of horizontal wells was carried out in Shaybah field. The program confirmed that average well productivities would be increased from 500 bd in vertical wells to over 5000 bd in horizontal wells, without incurring gas or water conning.
The improvement in well productivities allowed a change in project scope from 500 oil wells to deliver 250,000 bd of capacity to 140 oil and associated gas injection wells to deliver 550,000 bd of capacity. This change reduced the budgeted capital cost from $6.0 billion to $3.3 billion allowing the
Saudi Aramco management in 1995 to approve the Shaybah field development ahead of other projects in Ghawar.
[
Additional drilling and oil and gas processing capacity allowed the Shaybah field capacity to be increased in 2010 to 750,000 bd and to 1 million bd in 2016, including NGL recovery from the associated gas and a dedicated NGL pipeline to the Abqaiq plants.
A 386 km road had to be built across the dunes followed by a large landing strip to accommodate cargo jets. A central processing facility includes 3 ]gas oil separation plant
Gas is one of the four fundamental states of matter (the others being solid, liquid, and plasma).
A pure gas may be made up of individual atoms (e.g. a noble gas like neon), elemental molecules made from one type of atom (e.g. oxygen), or co ...
s, a gas compression plant, water desalination, housing facilities for 1,000 men, a library, swimming pool, and gymnasium. A 645 km high pressure pipeline connects the field with Abqaiq, and from there it connects into a network to the Ras Tanura
Ras Tanura ( ar, رأس تنورة, Ra's Tannūrah, lit=cape oven, cape brazier, presumably due to the unusual heat prevalent at the cape that projects into the sea) is a city in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia located on a peninsula extend ...
and Juaymah export terminals.[
The Shaybah oilfield has estimated 'extra light' crude oil reserves of over and of natural gas. The field is about 64 km long and 13 km wide, with production from a depth of about 2 km. Water occurs below and gas above the oil zone, so ]horizontal drilling
Directional drilling (or slant drilling) is the practice of drilling non-vertical bores. It can be broken down into four main groups: oilfield directional drilling, utility installation directional drilling, directional boring (horizontal dir ...
extending up to 12 km were employed to increase production efficiency up to 12,000 barrels per day. Geosteering Geosteering is the optimal placement of a wellbore based on the results of realtime downhole geological and geophysical logging measurements rather than three-dimensional targets in space. The objective is usually to keep a directional wellbore with ...
and 3D seismic imaging guided the well trajectories. Production came online in July 1998, on schedule and $800 million under budget.[ The total number of drilled wells as of June 2021 stood at 255 wells, including 205 horizontal oil wells, 34 vertical oil wells, 8 wells for gas injection, and 5 wells of groundwater.
]
Telecommunications
There is a 650-kilometer fibre optic cable linking Shaybah to the main radio system at Abqaiq.
References
* https://web.archive.org/web/20070314105032/http://www.saudiembassy.net/1999News/News/EneDetail.asp?cIndex=1098
External links
Shaybah as seen from space (zoomable)
The cluster on the left is the Saudi Aramco town of Shaybah, and on the right is the Shaybah Gas Oil Separation Plant-2. Zoom out for a perspective of the remoteness of Shaybah.
{{Saudi Arabia topics
Populated places in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia
Saudi Aramco oil and gas fields