The Dhahran Geoscience Society held a meeting in March in Al Khobar which was attended by some 220 members who represented a wide range of people involved in the oil and gas sector in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and people from the academic world.

Ahmed Al-Otaibi, Petroleum Geologist with Saudi Aramco Upstream Ventures, said, “We were very pleased to have welcomed Ceri Powell, outgoing Vice-President of Shell’s Exploration Business for the Middle East, Caspian and South Asia, who presented an address entitled ‘Riding the waves of exploration: global exploration trends, strategies, challenges and technologies’, which was very well received by the assembled audience.”





A Shell hero

Abdulrahman Awad Karar is a driver at Shell’s office in Riyadh in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Recently he was carrying a passenger from Riyadh to Al Khobar on the Kingdom’s east coast, and he came across a road accident on the journey in which a truck had struck the passenger side of a small saloon car with four people inside it. Two of the passengers had been taken from the car and were lying on the side of the road.

He says, “When I arrived at the scene one of the passengers was dead and the driver, with one other passenger, had been removed from the car. I helped remove the other passenger from the car and noticed that both passengers were having difficulty breathing.

“As part of my training at Shell I have undergone first aid and CPR [cardiac pulmonary resuscitation] training. I moved between the two passengers giving CPR for a few minutes, moving back and forth between the two of them, until a policeman arrived who also had CPR training. The two of us kept the passengers alive until the arrival, some 30 minutes later, of an ambulance with a doctor.

“The doctor told me that my actions had helped save the lives of these two passengers. I am just glad that, because of my Shell training, I was able to help them,” he says.