Desert Victory

OIL & GAS

Deep in the Middle East desert last week, a burnoosed Arab swung a Geiger counter over a fat steel pipe, tracing the progress of a radioactive swab inside. Behind the swab pushed a brown tide of oil, bound on a 1,068-mile journey from Arabian-American Oil Co.'s vast Saudi Arabian wells to the Mediterranean port of Sidon, in Lebanon. It was the first oil to pass through the $200 million Trans-Arabian pipeline (known as Tapline), the biggest overseas construction project ever financed by private U.S. capital.

Long Haul. The pipeline, which brings Aramco's oil closer to Western European markets, saves a fleet of 65 tankers by eliminating the ten-day, 3,500-mile haul around the Arabian Peninsula (see map). For its builder, Burt E. Hull, 66, a bluff, weatherbeaten Texan, who has been building pipelines for 40 years, it was the biggest job since he built the wartime Big and Little Inch pipelines. As president of Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., Hull now bosses the Arabian line for the four giant U.S. oil companies which financed it--Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), Standard of California, the Texas Co. and Socony-Vacuum. It took Hull almost three years to finish Tapline. To throw his line from the oilfields at Abqaiq near the Persian Gulf across four Arab lands to the Sidon terminus, Hull had to organize supply lines halfway around the world.

He mobilized a fleet of ships that carried 3 billion ton-miles of freight--including 265,000 tons of pipe--from more than 5,000 U.S. suppliers. On a Persian Gulf sandspit, he built a port. Across the desert he threaded 930 miles of highway. He operated 1,500 cars and trucks, built airfields, ran Tapline's own private airline and radio communication system. To get water, Hull's men dug 40 producing wells which now supply water to 100,000 Bedouin tribesmen, 150,000 camels and 300,000 sheep and goats. At the pipeline's six lonely pumping stations, he is building complete towns with movie theaters, mosques and athletic facilities for the use of American and Arab staffs that man the pumps.

Short Cut. This week, Arabian oil began filling the 13 huge storage tanks (capacity 188,000 barrels each) at Sidon. Early next month, when the pipeline and storage tanks are completely filled with 7,000,000 barrels of oil (more than all the oil pumped daily from all U.S. wells), tankers will begin loading at Sidon to take the oil to the thirsty refineries of the fighting West.

Tapline, which will deliver 350,000 barrels of oil a day to the Mediterranean coast, will change the oil-supply map of the world. The North Atlantic nations will get a much faster supply of oil because of the shorter Mediterranean route, previously fed only by Iraq Petroleum Co.'s pipelines from Kirkuk. Europe, long a big importer of oil from the Western Hemisphere, can now take more from the Middle East, leave Western Hemisphere supplies to the U.S., which now depends increasingly on imported oil.

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