The Jubail Superproject

By Alexander L. Taylor III

An instant skyline in the sands of Arabia

As big as the Alaskan pipeline and Hoover Dam are, nothing that Bechtel has ever helped build can compare with the Jubail project. Some 324 miles northeast of the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh, on desolate salt flats washed by the Persian Gulf and baked in 100-plus temperatures for much of the year, a whole new ultramodern city is emerging. When completed in 15 years, this megastructure will cover an area as large as Greater London and contain a population as numerous as that of Minneapolis.

In all the expansive sweep of civil engineering, from the pyramids of the Nile to the construction of the Panama Canal, nothing so huge, or costly, as Jubail has ever before been attempted by anyone." Says Saudi Arabian Finance Minister Mohammed Ali Abdul Khail, whose government has already spent $35 billion on Jubail and its smaller sister project Yanbu, and plans to spend upwards of $100 billion more in years to come: "We simply cannot exaggerate what is going on out here." Jubail is, in brief, a project of moon-landing proportions, one that in the very grandeur and scope of its conception suggests a 20th century version of the opening of the American West.

The search for historical comparisons with Jubail is daunting. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, 100,000 laborers struggled for 20 years to construct the Pyramid of Khufu, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Yet merely to level and grade Jubail's 66-sq.-mi. industrial park, a sector that comprises less than 15% of the entire city, engineers have had to shovel up and haul off 370 million cubic meters of sand--enough to fill the Khufu Pyramid 160 times over. If the landfill were used to construct a two-lane road, it would more than girdle the earth at the equator.

Jubail and Yanbu, which is under construction 700 miles to the southwest on the Red Sea, represent an Ozyman-dian-scale hedge by Saudi Arabia against the eventual depletion in 65 years of its 165 billion bbl. of proven crude oil reserves. The cities, replete with petrochemical complexes, refineries, a steel mill and smaller secondary industries by the dozen, will be counted on to help keep the Saudi economy vibrant and the country's small but rapidly growing population employed and enjoying a rising living standard far into the 21st century.

Overseeing the execution of this mind-stretching enterprise in Jubail are some 1,600 Bechtel architects, civil and mechanical engineers, draftsmen and project managers. Not only must they supervise the performance of 274 prime contractors and more than 500 smaller contractors for everything from kitchen cabinets to multimegawatt electric generators, but they also must manage a multilingual work force of 41,000 laborers from 39 countries.

In their short-sleeved shirts and wide ties, toting clipboards and pocket calculators, the Bechtel brigade seems the very can-do embodiment of American technological know-how. Its members also occasionally demonstrate a flair for improvisation that would do a World War II Navy Seabee proud. Earlier this year, 250 newly assembled Jubail modular housing units stood empty in the desert because some necessary plumbing fittings were missing. Two Bechtel employees promptly boarded a plane, flew 13,000 miles round trip to the U.S. and back and returned carrying several containers of faucets, nuts and washers as excess baggage.

Bechtel's connection with the Saudis goes back more than 30 years. Stephen Bechtel Sr., son of the founder and father of the current chairman, Stephen Jr., became friends with the late Saudi monarch, King Ibn Saud, during the 1940s when the company worked on an oil refinery in Bahrain. From that early association, a long-lasting--and profitable--Saudi friendship flowered. In 1948 a team of Bechtel engineers mobilized an army of 5,000 local laborers to build the greater part of the 1,068-mile-long Trans-Arabian pipeline. Bechtel's swift execution of the mammoth job, as well as its skillful handling of local labor, added enormously to the firm's Middle East reputation.

More recently, Bechtel designed the master plan for the King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, then won the assignment to manage the construction. Now nearing completion, the airport will be finished on time and within the expected budget of $3.2 billion. By comparison, the King Abdulaziz International Airport at Jidda, built by the rival California firm of Parsons Corp., ran far over budget because of design changes before finally being completed last year at a cost of more than $4.5 billion.

The origins of the Jubail project go back to a 1973 meeting at the Bechtel-built Geneva Intercontinental Hotel, between Stephen Sr., then already in his 70s, and Saudi King Faisal, the son of Ibn Saud. Bechtel listened as the King complained that $1 billion worth of natural gas had to be burned every year in Saudi Arabia's oilfields because there was no way the gas could be cheaply transported to locations where it could be used as fuel.

Bechtel proposed an audacious solution: assemble a complex of automated petrochemical plants near the oilfields to process and use the wasted gases. The fuel could be used not only to provide raw material for the development of a new petrochemical industry, but also supply the energy to process and manufacture products ranging from plastics and fertilizers to steel and aluminum. The King agreed. The Bechtel firm produced a master plan for the project, and in 1976 was chosen as construction manager.

Even for a company of Bechtel's resources, experience and depth, Jubail represented a staggering undertaking. When the site for the new city was officially dedicated in October 1977 by King Khalid, who had ascended to the Saudi throne on the death of his half-brother Faisal two years earlier, there was little at Jubail but scrub, sand and the nearby fishing village of Al Jubail seven miles to the south on the Persian Gulf. Within twelve months, enough trailers to house 13,000 workers had been plopped onto the sandscape. A 13,000-ft. runway, capable of receiving the largest of wide-body aircraft, was built from scratch in less than a year. By 1980, 5 million gal. of fresh water daily were flowing ashore from a Japanese-built desalination plant that rose six stories above the warm Persian Gulf waters.

Today, the desert terrain is animated by Caterpillar tractors, huge construction cranes hovering over the metal skeletons of warehouses and the rising silhouettes of four mini-Astrodomes that will serve as petrochemical storage tanks. A seemingly endless procession of huge earth movers trundles sand and rock to the water's edge, where the fill is used to extend an immense quarter-mile-wide causeway, one of the largest landfill operations of its kind. When completed in 1985, the six-mile-long causeway will provide berths for up to 18 ocean-going cargo ships at a time. At its farthest outward point sits a colossal open-sea crude-oil loading terminal large enough to accommodate a 500,000-ton supertanker.

Because of Jubail's extreme remoteness, nearly all manufactured goods are being shipped to the building sites already partially assembled. In the process, the city is becoming a genuinely modular community, a gigantic expanse of clip-together factories and buildings. The 205-bed Al Huwaylat Hospital, provided by the H.B. Zachry Co. of San Antonio, is arriving at the site virtually in kit form and being assembled room by room, each module having been delivered complete, down to the toilet-paper holders in the bathrooms. Even the hospital's prayer room, which has mosque carpets and lighting directed toward Mecca, was built in Alabama and transported overseas.

The homes designed for the city's permanent residents are so cozily American as to suggest habitats for Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, or maybe the Cleaver family of TV sitcom fame. Typical of the more lavish structures are three-bedroom ranchettes done in a kind of Arabic Southern California motif, with central air conditioning, parquet floors, and General Electric ranges and Kitchenaid pot-scrubber dishwashers in the kitchen. Prices can range as high as $300,000 each for the dwellings, though much more modest accommodations, including town houses and four-story apartment buildings, are also going up.

One of the more visually arresting features of Jubail is the Al Mantekah Al Sakaniyah marina, with smooth white beaches that could grace a Club Mediterranee advertisement. Occupying the four choicest miles of Jubail's 28.8 miles of coastline are three man-made lagoons. Two of them are for swimming (one for families and single women and one for single men). The third is for boating. Eventually, the marina will be landscaped with a winding boardwalk as well as shade gazebos and date palms, giving the area the appearance of a Hawaiian resort.

So far, Bechtel has managed its huge project without noticeable criticism or complaint from its Croesus-rich client. One reason is the company's almost ferocious dedication to careful planning and delivery scheduling, which seeks to avoid supply shortages and transportation interruptions that can produce budget overruns and delays. Indeed, while port operations in many developing countries frequently lead to congestion that leaves ships queuing for months on end, Saudi officials boast that demurrage (delay time) at Jubail is "not a single day."

Over the long haul, however, getting Jubail to work and function as a thriving industrial metropolis could turn out to be every bit as challenging as building the city. For one thing, Jubail's planned industries will be cranking out a prodigious supply of basic industrial products that many experts argue the world has too much of already.

Currently under construction in Jubail's industrial park are a $1 billion oil refinery, a $300 million petrochemical plant, a $2 billion polyethylene project, a $4 billion industrial chemicals plant, a $600 million iron and steel complex, and a $360 million plant to produce fertilizer pellets. In most of those industries, worldwide production gluts already abound, though a pickup in the global economy would help stimulate demand at least somewhat in consuming countries. Mean while, however, the Saudis have already been forced to cancel plans for a 225,000-ton-per-year aluminum smelter, and additional retrenchment may eventually prove unavoidable.

Such a rapid, government-directed modernization helped topple the Shah of Iran, and has disrupted other traditional societies. Saudi Arabia has advantages, however, that should enable it to avoid a similar disaster. Unlike Iran, the population is culturally homogeneous, and shares more closely its own brand of Islamic religion. Moreover, the royal family is closely allied with the religious leaders and popular as well with the rest of the people. Nor is the kingdom beset by a teeming urban center with an underclass ripe for revolt. Observes one U.S. expert: "You really don't have the same economic strains in the modernization process. The government has kept inflation to around 8% a year, and there simply isn't any unemployment." Even so, it is not all that certain that the tradition-minded Saudis will want to move to Jubail in the first place. By and large, educated Saudis display a desire to remain in wealthy metropolises like Jidda, Riyadh and Dhahran, where easy money is to be found and white-collar jobs are plentiful. Yet to equip less-educated and poorer Saudis for the employment challenges of Jubail will take many years of social development that is now only in its earliest stages.

Moreover, Saudi social scientists warn of the lack of any sort of precedent for the migration of Saudi families in pursuit of employment. Even in a culture that has advanced from camels to Cadillacs since the discovery of oil, Jubail may remain an uncomfortable place for the mass of the Saudi population. And since the government has no plans for enforced migration of workers, an effort that would doubtless enrage every fiercely independent Saudi in the country, residents will have to move voluntarily. Otherwise, the infant city could wind up becoming an enormously expensive ghost town.

Should the Jubail project fail to live up to its billing, Bechtel's worldwide reputation would suffer a severe blow. As the prime mover behind the project, as well as its master planner, the firm bears a large responsibility for Jubail's eventual success. At this point, however, no one is betting against the California engineers. Muses a U.S. embassy officer from Jidda: "If Saudi Arabia is any indication, Bechtel follows one motto: Think big. You get the feeling that if the U.S. Government had not thought of the moon landing first, Bechtel would have proposed the idea --and then sold it to someone." In Saudi Arabia, the world's most formidable master builder seems to have done nearly that.-- By Alexander L. Taylor IlL Reported by William Blaylock/ Jubail

With reporting by William Blaylock/Jubail

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