Our history

Our story is one of creativity and perseverance in equal measure. We’ve overcome challenges, advanced knowledge in our industry and far beyond, and helped usher in an age of abundant energy and transformative technology.

Our history is one we’re proud of, and which inspires us as we evolve and transition into a new era of energy.

Discover more about Aramco’s founding, and some of our key milestones and achievements through the years, below.

Aramco traces its beginnings to 1933 when a Concession Agreement was signed between Saudi Arabia and the Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL). A subsidiary company, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (CASOC), was created to manage the agreement.

The work began right away: following surveys of the Saudi desert, drilling began in 1935.

Following years of effort with little to show for it, in 1937, SOCAL executives sought advice from their chief geologist, Max Steineke. Drawing on years of fieldwork, Steineke told them to keep on drilling.

Finally, success
In 1938, the efforts finally paid off with the commencement of commercial oil production from Dammam No. 7 — the aptly named Prosperity Well.

From the late 1940s, we grew from strength to strength — hitting record-breaking oil production milestones. Along the way, we were making Saudi Arabia famous for its energy, too.

Now named Aramco (the Arabian American Oil Company), our crude oil production hit 500,000 barrels per day in 1949. Our rapid increase in oil production meant we had to expand our distribution efforts as well. In 1950, we completed the 1,212-kilometer Trans-Arabian Pipeline (Tapline) — at the time the longest in the world.

The Tapline linked eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean Sea, sharply cutting the time and cost of exporting oil to Europe. And, after two years of exploration in the shallow Arabian Gulf waters, we located the Safaniyah field in 1951, the world’s largest offshore oil field discovered so far. And in 1958, Aramco’s crude oil production exceeded 1 million barrels per day.

Billions of barrels
By 1962, we reached another milestone, with cumulative crude oil production reaching 5 billion barrels. And by 1971, average daily production of crude oil had ramped up to 4.49 million barrels, which was roughly 1.6 billion barrels per year.

Throughout the 1970s, we not only proved ourselves as an economic force for Saudi Arabia, but we also returned to our Saudi Arabian heritage. In 1973, the Saudi government bought a 25% interest in Aramco, increasing that interest to 60% the following year.

In 1980, the Saudi government increased its interest in Aramco to 100%. Eight years later, the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco) was officially established — a new company to take over all the responsibilities of Aramco, with His Excellency Ali I. Al-Naimi becoming our first Saudi Company President in 1984, and the first Saudi President and CEO in 1988.

The following year, Saudi Aramco began its transformation from an oil producing and exporting company to an integrated petroleum enterprise, with the formation of Star Enterprises in 1989 — a joint venture with Texaco in the United States. This would evolve to become Motiva, initially a partnership with Texaco and Shell, which in 2017 progressed to Saudi Aramco being the sole owner of North America’s largest single-site crude oil refinery, located at Port Arthur, Texas.

Throughout the 1990s, we gradually extended our ties and partnerships across the world and making several international investments — starting with our purchase in 1991 of a 35% interest in the SsangYong Oil Refining Company (renamed S-Oil in 2000) in the Republic of Korea.

Our expansion continued in 1994, when we acquired a 40% interest in Petron Corporation, then the largest crude oil refiner and marketer in the Philippines. And then in 1996, we made several overseas investments in Europe, purchasing 50% in privately-held Greek refiner Motor Oil (Hellas) Corinth Refineries S.A., and its marketing affiliate, Avinoil Industrial Commercial and Maritime Oil Company, S.A.

Today, we are represented in the three major global energy markets of Asia, Europe, and North America.

Leading up to the millennium, using advanced techniques to help us discover and extract crude oil became essential. We needed technology on our side.

In 1997, we developed POWERS (Parallel Oil-Water-Gas-Reservoir Simulator), a high-resolution reservoir simulator that models and predicts the performance of super-giant reservoirs. POWERS was so successful that it went on to inspire a range of more powerful and precise Aramco simulation software.

In 2000, we built the state-of-the-art Research and Development Center (R&DC) in Dhahran as the foundation for a network of research centers across the world working on breakthroughs to increase discovery and recovery, reduce costs and GHG emissions, and enhance safety.

Our success in world-scale innovation was highlighted when, in 2010, we unveiled our giga-cell reservoir simulation technology, GigaPOWERS — the second generation of POWERS. And then, six years later, TeraPOWERS — the industry’s first trillion cell reservoir simulation.

By the early 2000s, to help us achieve our vision of becoming the world’s leading integrated energy and chemicals enterprise, we continued to diversify.

With many ways of delivering value from a barrel of oil — including nonmetallic and crude-to-chemicals products — we moved beyond traditional markets and uses for oil and gas. We also invested in new solutions to achieve more efficient production and consumption of our energy products, including programs aimed at enhancing the performance and lowering the emissions of transportation. 

Looking forward, we envision transforming our hydrocarbon resources into multiple new streams of value, while continuing to remain a reliable supplier of lower-carbon energy to the world.