Oil in the Sahara

on the World Today

THERE was a time when the Sahara was not the sea of arid sand and desert rock it is known as today. In what is loosely called the prehistoric age, when much of Europe was covered by the ice of the polar cap, this vast region was garlanded with lakes and rivers and inhabited by a Negroid race of hunters.

Flint arrowheads, knife blades, and axes still litter the less barren stretches of the Sahara, while the silhouettes of Central African fauna — elephants, rhinoceroses, ostriches, buffaloes, antelope, and giraffe — have been preserved for us in cave paintings that stretch all the way from the Nemencha Mountains in southeastern Algeria to the caverns of the volcanic Hoggar.

The retreat of the polar icecap is in part the explanation for the subsequent desiccation of the Sahara, but it is not the only one. Lying as it does in the general latitudes of the Tropic of Cancer, the Sahara is subjected to an almost ceaseless bombardment of hot air, originating in the tropics, which has had the moisture drained out of it long before it descends on the parched sands. Rain falls on the more favored regions four or five times a year, while in the Tanezrouft it rains on an average of once every seven years.

The original Negroid inhabitants have migrated south, leaving the wind-blown wastes to the sole dominion of nomadic warriors from the north and cast. In the last thousand years these nomads have put the finishing touches to the long process of desiccation by drinking up the water of the oases, allowing their goats to devour the local vegetation, cutting down the hillside forests for winter firewood, and neglecting the elaborate network of cisterns which the Romans and Byzantines had carefully built up along the fringes of the desert.

By the early nineteen hundreds the Sahara had become the world’s least habitable wilderness. Its population of one and a half million was almost exclusively nomadic: in the north the descendants of the Arab Bedouins who swept over North Africa between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries; in the south the veiled Tuaregs of the mountainous Hoggar, descendants of the Berbers who only yesterday were fighting their foes with lances, straight Crusader-like swords, and shields made of antelope hide. From the Atlas Mountains in the north to the Niger in the south, the Sahara gave the impression of being a huge, godforsaken waste whose legendary riches were no more than mirages.

Today the face of the inhospitable Sahara is changing before a new invasion that promises to be more far-reaching than any previously known. The new conqueror of the Sahara is the geologist, and his conquest promises to make it the Siberia of France, if not of Western Europe.

The discovery of oil

As early as 1922 a young French geologist named Conrad Killian set forth on an expedition bent on discovering the legendary emeralds of the Hoggar. He returned to Paris a year later with an enthusiastic account of the traces of organic matter and rock formations indicative of oil which he had found. But no one took his report seriously.

After World War II the French government took official cognizance of Killian’s and other geologists’ surveys and set up the Bureau de Recherche de Pétrole, which now has scores of geophysical teams scouring for hidden resources both in metropolitan France and in its overseas possessions. One month later the first Sahara prospecting company was established under its aegis — the Société Nationale de Recherche et d’Exploitation des Petroles en Algérie.

In December, 1956, the prospectors discovered oil at a depth of 10,000 feet some thirty-five miles from the north Saharan town of Ouargla and near an abandoned water well. The stuccobuilt well still stands as a monument to an archaic way of life. And its name, Messaoud’s Well — or, as the Arabs say, Hassi Messaoud — has stuck, but today it designates what is almost certainly one of the world’s great oil fields.

Two French companies, the Société Nationale and the Compagnie Frangaisedes Petrolésd’ Algérie, have pooled their resources to explore and exploit the Hassi Messaoud deposit. Though they have been forced by the present lack of French petroleum equipment to use American derricks and some American tractors, most of the pumps, borers, motors, and all of the capital are French. Ten of the eleven wells so far sunk have proved productive and capable of supplying 250 to 300 tons a day. Ten other wells are being sunk and should be in production by the end of the year. The soundings so far taken indicate that the Hassi Messaoud field may have oil reserves approaching 300 million tons — enough to satisfy France’s needs for a good ten years.

At the present time the flow from the productive wells is deliberately held to 1200 tons a day, this being the maximum capacity of the 6-inch pipeline linking Hassi Messaoud to Touggourt, one hundred miles to the north. At Touggourt, the oil is pumped into tanker cars and carried north by rail to the Algerian port of Philippeville. Work has already begun, however, on a 24-inch pipeline which will link Hassi Messaoud directly to the port of Bougie, a distance of some four hundred miles. This pipeline, which must cross mountains 3500 feet high before reaching the sea, will be ready in October, 1959, and will permit an annual flow of 14 million tons of oil by 1960.

Conquest by technology

In solving the problems of water, climate, and transportation, the technicians of Hassi Messaoud have been aided both by ultramodern technology and by good luck. The luck has come in the form of water deposits, discovered in the course of drilling for oil. No less than three separate water reservoirs have been found at Hassi Messaoud. The first, at a depth of 220 feet, provides water which must be pumped to the surface but which is fresh, cool, and immediately drinkable. The second, at a depth of some 4000 feet, provides steaming hot water which gushes forth under pressure at a temperature of 145 degrees Fahrenheit and which is ideally suited for making the mud used in drilling and sinking pipe. Still a third water layer has been found at a depth of over 8000 feet, in this case salt water under the extremely high pressure of 580 kilograms per square centimeter, which, if released, could throw up a geyser several hundred feet high.

The second problem — that of the heat — has been solved by a combination of endurance, air conditioning, and personnel rotation. At Hassi Messaoud work goes on day and night, in three shifts of eight hours each. At midday in the summer months the thermometer often registers 140 degrees in the sun. But the work continues, and those exposed to the sun’s pitiless rays keep themselves going by imbibing five gallons of liquid and swallowing a dozen salt pills a day. Airplanes bringing in fresh meat and vegetables have to land before ten in the morning to avoid missing the landing strip, which later in the day becomes obscured by hot air eddies rising from the torrid sands. Every three weeks the workers at Messaoud are granted relief from their desert exile — no wives or dependents are permitted on the field — and flown back to Algiers or to France for a rest.

The greatest problem at Hassi Messaoud is that posed by distance and transportation. To maintain the present tempo of expansion, two thousand tons of material have to be brought into Hassi Messaoud every week by road. This includes everything from pipe for new wells and storage tanks to earth for the palm trees which are being planted around the wooden cabins of the camps.

The trip from Algiers to Hassi Messaoud (six hundred miles by road), which used to take a week, can now be done in three days, but even so it is no picnic. Between Djelfa and the Saharan outpost of Laghouat the road winds through gorges amid fellagha-infested mountains. Trucks have to assemble at military check points and go through in convoy formation. Today there is little danger of ambush, but every so often a truck blows up on a mine.

At Laghouat the desert begins, and here a new danger looms: the danger of getting lost. A fine asphalt highway now extends from Laghouat some three hundred miles southeast, but a minor dust storm is enough to cover it completely. The service companies responsible for keeping the highway open maintain a fleet of brush-sweeping trucks which wage an almost daily battle against the drifting sands.

But there are times when even they are powerless to arrest the tide. In November and December, when the sirocco blows most fiercely, dust storms may last as long as a week. Truck drivers must then hole up in their cabins until the storm has abated. To help them face such ordeals each driver is accompanied by a mechanic (known as a “greaser”) and carries with him two hundredgallon barrels of water and provisions to last a month.

At the present time the asphalt road extends some fifty miles beyond Hassi Messaoud as far as a military post called Fort Lallemand. From here there are another six hundred miles to the other major oil field that has been discovered in the Sahara: Edjelé, located on the border of Libya. Here the problems of exploitation are almost exactly the reverse of those at Hassi Messaoud. The three pools of oil so far discovered in this region lie at depths of 1200 to 4000 feet and can be tapped with small derricks and wells that take a mere two weeks to sink. The problem is one of getting the necessary equipment into Edjelé (1250 miles from Algiers) and the oil out to the sea.

The reserves so far discovered at Edjelé are estimated at 100 million tons. The C.ompagnie de Recherche et d’ Exploitation de Pétrole au Sahara, which exploits the Edjelé basin, already has some thirty wells in operation and expects to have from two hundred to four hundred going by 1961. It then expects to be producing 5 million tons of oil a year, which can be shipped to France either by a link-up with the Touggourt-Bougie pipeline or through a new pipeline which could be brought northeastward to the Tunisian port of Gabès or across the Libyan desert to Tripoli.

It is the belief of Some French geologists that the two productive fields so far unearthed are only scratches on the surface of the Sahara’s petroleum wealth. Their optimism has communicated itself to a number of French and foreign oil concerns, of which more than a dozen now have prospecting permits covering vast areas of the desert. The foreign firms include Royal Dutch-Shell, British Petroleum, and three American companies, Sinclair Oil, Phillips Petroleum, and the Cities Service Company.

Natural gas

Along with oil, the Sahara contains vast deposits of natural gas. Two major reservoirs have already been discovered, one at In Salah, in the central Sahara, the other at Hassi R’mel, in the north. For the moment neither is being exploited, for lack of a pipeline linking them to the Algerian coast. But farseeing French engineers are dreaming of the day when this gas will be piped north to the area of Bône and there transformed into electric energy for shipment by submarine cable to Sicily and Southern Italy. In the meantime enough gas is burned off every day at Hassi Messaoud to satisfy twice the existing needs of the entire Algerian population.

This illustrates the challenge which the wealth of the Sahara now poses. Its gas and petroleum resources could easily supply the energetic basis for that industrialization of Algeria which is now so urgently needed to provide jobs for a starving and increasing population. As it is, the development of a Sahara petroleum industry, necessitating the construction of roads, pipelines, railways, and airfields as well as the assemblage and maintenance of trucks has given work to thousands.

It is even possible to envisage the day when the 7 million Muslims of the Algerian hinterland will enjoy natural gas piped straight into their homes, and will spare the trees they have hitherto been chopping down for firewood. But that day still seems remote, and it would necessitate a monumental effort of re-education and rehousing on a scale that has probably never been attempted in an underdeveloped country. For the tragedy of the Algerian economy is that the great mass of its population are simply too impoverished at the present time to be able to benefit from the vast riches of the Sahara.