Victories, colossal defeats, and victories in the Middle East

FROM Myanmar, Thailand, and the Kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas, we returned to Manila, rested for a few days, and then we journeyed on to Dubai, commercial and aviation center of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), whose capital is the oil-rich and largest emirate, Abu Dhabi.

With much nostalgia, our son Jose de Venecia III, today honorary consul of Azerbaijan, was with us together with our parliamentary assistant of many years, Aldwin Requejo. Joey III had his first exposure to the Arab world in the mid 1970s at age 16 as an apprentice in our company in Kuwait and Iraq. Shortly before our next flight to Tehran, seat of the ancient Persian Empire, we briefly motored to Ajman, the smallest emirate in the UAE. The other emirates are of course oil-rich Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Ajman, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Umm Al Quwain, and Fujerah on the coast of the Persian Gulf (Arab Gulf to the Arabs), between Oman and Saudi Arabia.

The desert sands had long enveloped the exploratory oil well we drilled in the mid-1970s in Ajman, on the coast, whose population today is listed at 372,923, living in some 250 square kilometers of largely flat land. Our two Philippine oil exploration companies then, Basic Petroleum and Landoil, were the first pioneering Filipino companies to venture in the Arab world. At that time, we won in tough international bidding as prime contractor in operating the Port of Jeddah, with our joint-venture, Philippine-Singapore Ports Corporation (Philsinports) at the helm with multi-national executives and 3,500 Filipino port workers on the Red Sea, and opened and operated as well the Port of Jubail, also on the Gulf facing Iran not too far from Ras Tanura, seat of Saudi Arabia’s richest oil fields in Arabia’s eastern region, peopled largely by Shi’ite and Sunni Muslims. We operated Jubail with another set of executives and some 800 port workers, closer to Kuwait and the Shatt Al Arab en route to the Iraqi frontier, where as in Jeddah, we built our executive offices and mass housing.

We were perhaps the largest pioneering Southeast Asian companies in the Middle East at the time, as prime contractors, with our own equipment, management team, and work force, not labor recruiters. On the Ajman project, we brought from Manila by sea-freight a heavy US-built oil-drilling rig, and our capable drilling superintendent was the respected white-haired Mario Nieto, who was then vice-president and general manager of Podco. Our brother Oscar de Venecia, president of Basic Petroleum, literally borrowed Mario from old man Andres Soriano’s oil company Podco on “lend-lease.” We also engaged the American Dr. Francis Gibson, who was a celebrated geologist of the then US-owned Iraqi Oil Company, which was responsible at the time for some of the big oilfield discoveries in Iraq. Thus we Filipinos were ready, drilled, and co-financed with Arab entrepreneurs the first-ever Filipino and Asian-Arab oil wells in Ajman as prime contractor and risk-taker (not sub-contractor), in this poorest emirate of the UAE. Our other key executives in the field were the late Luis Catubig, the late Mario Uson, Ambrosio “Boy” Collado, and Gus Macam of Pangasinan and of Basic/ Landoil, and Jess Galang, of Pampanga, who later moved to Dubai and is today a successful entrepreneur there.

After a few weeks, at perhaps 3,000 to 4,000 feet depth, our memory does not remember the exact depth, we hit good guzzling crude, and soon the entire Filipino-Arab-American drilling crew were screaming with joy and drenched in oil as in the old Texas movie, the “Giant.”

But as fate would have it, when we hit black gold, the price of crude worldwide was at $38 per barrel, the highest at the time, and we were jumping with joy and imbibing prohibited champagne. Soon after a few weeks, however, the price began to slide to $30 per barrel, and before we knew it, plunged to $20, then $15, and then settled at the bottom, at $8 per barrel. All of us were sobbing as if our desert had become one large funeral parlor. We closed down the rig and we shipped it home together with our much disappointed drilling crew. (To be continued)