Libya

Libya ‘68/’69

I flew to Tripoli in Autumn ‘68 and never was one more exposed to a life-altering step-changing experience!

It Was The Best of Times…….. Tripoli was a sight. Still run by Italians (restaurants, barbers, cobblers, you name it). It was also warm and sunny under intense blue skies in November, which led me to want to always live in sunny climes thereafter. The MobilOil folks in the office were really welcoming and friendly. Also friendly were some very large local gents who sought to engage me at the bar in the town’s best hotel (The Libya Palace Hotel). A new experience.

After a couple of days in the office, it was out to the desert on the company plane, a DC 3! After a very brief orientation and trying to understand what the training regime would encompass, I was despatched to a drilling rig. Without boring you, the Petroleum disciplines are mainly Drilling, Production, Reservoir, so in theory we should have been given an orientation involving all three. Reservoir allegedly required more experience so got left to last. For us in the field it was attractive because it was office- based in Tripoli. Town of course was where it was all happening! Two things about Petroleum Engineering. I asked how come they recruited engineers from other disciplines, like Mechanical, (remember, this was way before the advent of North Sea oil). Mobil’s answer was “if you can get an engineering degree, we can make you into a Petroleum Engineer!” The other thing that was interesting was that they never recruited again from the UK or Ireland! The intake the next year were from the US! So, how lucky was I! Entry into a lifelong fascinating and rewarding career by a fluke.

The first few rotations on the drilling rig were mainly notable for the vast quantities of food that were served up daily. When I went to Libya I weighed 140 lbs. After 3 months I weighed 160 lbs!. The other interesting thing about the rig, apart from the fact that I had never worked in close quarters with Americans (or anybody else, for that matter) was that the crew were Mormons! So, no alcohol, no sodas, etc. Very dull, but again very nice helpful people. After a few months of learning the ropes I graduated to the main field office and started doing lots of other oily thing. Again there was usually a mentor-type senior engineer who came out from Tripoli and would help you progress. To this day I am still in awe of the time and interest the senior people took in us Junior Engineers, as we were called. Very quickly I was doing all sorts of things on my own, from testing new oil wells (lighting the flare one time burned all the hair off my face, including eyebrows), to supervising the construction of oil processing stations (I built one the “wrong” way round). There was a great deal of hustle in 1969. Maybe the higher-ups sensed what was coming. We worked all hours and often through the night. I can vividly remember sitting in a Land Rover at 4 am monitoring a drilling rig, with the big boss coming by to check up! But it was fun too, haring around the desert at high speed. Sometimes even seeing the debris left over from burned out Brit army hardware courtesy of Rommel. The only really scary thing I experienced was when I was guiding a truckload of equipment deep down south and got lost for 3 days in a sand storm. we then ran out of fuel (going round in circles, maybe?). I did think I might perish, but then on day 4 a Mobil search plane spotted us and we were rescued. Fun times.

The schedule we worked was 45/18 home and Libya. Travel was through Rome airport and to my mind that’s where “civilization” ended. Once you went to board a plane in Rome it was chaos. No rules, no orderly lines. just pushing and shoving. The scheduled travel was helpful for taking one or two days in Rome or other nearby destinations. But I was usually in a hurry to get back to spend my days off with Liz so hardly used that opportunity. I mentioned before that there was a grad student in UCD who was also working for Mobil in Libya, Bernard Gilespie. He was a bit of a dry stick, but sometimes our schedules coincided and we traveled together between Dublin and Tripoli. He managed to spend a lot more time in the Tripoli office than I did, but we did do stuff together, like swimming in the deserted Libyan Med or exploring the, equally deserted, magnificent Roman remains of Leptis Magna and Sabratha , Tripoli itself being the third Tri Polis of the Roman province. There is no doubt that these Roman ruins are far and away the best in the world, and largely unvisited. When the photos below were taken, there was nobody else there!

There is no doubt that my first 12 months of real employment were fantastical. I was learning at a phenomenal rate, when in the field I worked all sorts of crazy hours, I was close to being unsupervised and I liked the people I worked with. An interesting snippet. I was supervising the new American engineers in July 1969 and found they were getting paid about 3 times my salary . I complained to the Engineering manager in Tripoli, Bob Mills (of whom more later). He said he was sympathetic, but that if I got paid what the Americans earned I’d be earning more that the PM of the UK! He did however bump up my salary. As I said, we were being worked off our feet, tying in new oil wells as fast as we could and exporting the oil. The desert was crawling with phenomenally highly paid American welders who were constructing new pipelines at breakneck speed. I sometimes used to wish for the pressure to ease off….but as they say, be careful what you wish for!