On Saudi Aramco’s campus at the edge of the Arabian Gulf, the vast scale of the world’s biggest oil producer is on stark display. In one building, a curved monitor 140 feet long wraps around a room, tracking the crude flowing through 25,000 miles of pipelines.
A short distance away, in the company’s “advanced exploration and petroleum engineering research center,” or EXPECArc, scientists fine-tune seismic drones that can analyze underground rock formations and transmit the data back to engineers within seconds—sparing Aramco the expense and risk of dispatching teams into the desert to drill for oil. Meanwhile, others test fast-curing cement injected with carbon and experiment with compounds built to suck carbon directly from the air—trying to build technology that could reduce the polluting effects of burning that oil.
