The remarkable story of one man's journey to leadership of the
world's largest energy company, The Caravan Goes On is the first
published inside account of the workings of the corporation by a
CEO and represents a significant addition to the literature on the
turbulent development of the world's oil industry. Frank Jungers,
former President, Chairman and CEO of the petroleum giant Aramco,
tells the inside story of his three decades in Saudi Arabia
(1947-1978) with the world's largest oil producing company. A North
Dakota farm boy Jungers rose to the top of one of the most
important hydrocarbon enterprises ever, a company that eventually
found itself responsible for nearly one-quarter of the world's oil
resources. He writes of his face-to-face encounters with King
Faisal and other Saudi leaders, and his role in steering the
company through major international crises that included the 1973
Arab-Israeli war, the dramatic oil price increases of the 1970s,
the Arab oil embargo and the OPEC hostage incident of 1975. Central
to Jungers' story is his role in helping to develop Aramco's Saudi
workforce in preparation for the eventual transfer of company
ownership from four American oil majors to the Government of Saudi
Arabia. He explains the unique nature of the ownership transfer,
which was remarkably different from the bitter nationalization
process seen in Iraq, Libya, Iran and Venezuela. Jungers describes
how Aramco and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in an important sense
grew up together, and he highlights the crucial role played by
Aramco in the development of the young nation's infrastructure and
economy. The Caravan Goes On describes the origins of the petroleum
industry in Saudi Arabia, with the granting of a concession in 1933
to a subsidiary of Standard Oil of California, the first of
Aramco's four oil-company parents. Jungers talks of his own origins
as the son of farmer in North Dakota, the family's migration
westward due to drought and depression, and his engineering studies
at the University of Washington. Jungers began his career in Saudi
Arabia working at Ras Tanura, site of Aramco's first oil refinery
and oil tanker terminal. He describes how Aramco built its initial
workforce, consisting of Americans, Italians, Saudis and other
nationalities; he explains how it soon became clear that the future
of the Saudi oil industry belonged not with foreign oil interest
but to the people of Saudi Arabia; and he relates how he and others
worked to give Saudis the training and incentives needed to take
over and successfully operate what would become the world's premier
oil producing and exporting company. At the same time, Aramco, with
its technological expertise and its access to international
specialists, began playing a central role in the development of the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The company, with support and
encouragement of the Saudi Kings, took a lead role in building
healthcare, agriculture, the railroads, the electric grid and other
sectors of the Saudi economy. The story of the "King Faisal Era"
(including the monarch's role in the oil price issue, the Arab oil
embargo and his closed-door meetings with the King and his key
advisers, including Oil Minister Shaikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani) are
vividly described, as well as the shock of King Faisal's tragic
death and the tense moments of the OPEC hostage incident that began
in Vienna and ended in North Africa. Jungers speaks of his
involvement in launching Saudi Arabia's Master Gas System, now a
central part of the national economy and his pivotal role in the
consolidation of Saudi Arabia's electrical power grid in the
Eastern Province. When he returned to Saudi Arabia in 2008 to
attend the celebrations of the company's 75th anniversary he fully
realized the success of the Aramco venture - how it had indeed
prepared large numbers of Saudis for the responsibilities of
leading their country's oil industry into a new and exciting
economic era. This personal, colorful and up-close view is required
reading for oil-industry watchers as well as those interested in
big business, geopolitics, America's role in the Middle East and
the extraordinary transformation and emergence of modern Saudi
Arabia since oil was discovered in its Eastern Province.
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