Four score and seven years ago, Saudi Arabia’s founding father King Abdulaziz crossed the Dahna Desert in a convoy of 400 cars to reach the Gulf port of Ras Tanura, where a tanker called the DG Scofield was waiting.
Aramco’s archival footage shows the monarch turning the valve himself, enabling the first shipment of Saudi oil to leave on May 1, 1939. The well it came from, Dammam No. 7, produced for 45 years and yielded more than 32 million barrels before it was finally plugged in 1982.
During those years and since, a Bedouin peninsula has been transformed into a landscape of skyscrapers, sovereign wealth funds, and vaulting ambition — even if the Iran war has, for now at least, left Ras Tanura and other energy facilities in the Gulf far quieter.