Dhahran, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabiai

Regional Level Types
Dhahran	City
Eastern Province	Region
Saudi Arabia	Country

Dhahran (Arabic: الظهران, Romanized: al-Ẓahrān) is a city located in the Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. It is a major administrative center for the Saudi oil industry. Together with the nearby cities of Dammam and Khobar, Dhahran forms part of the Dammam Metropolitan Area, which is commonly known as greater Dammam.

Large oil reserves were first identified in the Dhahran area in 1931, and in 1935, American company Standard Oil drilled the first commercially viable oil well. Standard Oil later established a subsidiary in Saudi Arabia called the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), now owned by the Saudi government and known as Saudi Aramco. Dhahran has been the home of Saudi Aramco's headquarters for 80 years and is its first and largest gated compound with more than 50,000 residents. Employees and dependents of Aramco, known as Aramcons, have a tendency to use Dhahran to solely refer to the Aramco camp while using Khobar and/or Dammam to refer to the area outside the camp.

Dhahran is unusual in that a large portion of it is made up of gated areas including Saudi Aramco's headquarters and residential camp, the King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (built by Aramco) and the King Abdulaziz Air Base. Dhahran is also home to the Mall of Dhahran, one of the biggest shopping complexes in the Eastern Province.

The patch of desert on which the city is built is hilly and rocky, and most of the earliest productive oil wells in Saudi Arabia were drilled in the area, such as Dammam Well No. 7: "Prosperity Well", the first commercially viable oil well in Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. This well was still in production 70 years later. This later led to the selection of two barren nearby hills as the place for Aramco to construct its headquarters.

The Dhahran-Dammam area is one of two regions, the other being Jeddah, that were selected as potential sites to build the first Saudi nuclear reactor.

Other Databases

Wikipedia:	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dhahran
Wikidata ID:	Q268915

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