BASRA, Iraq (AP) – It is almost dawn and Zainab Amjad has been awake all night working on an oil rig in southern Iraq. He lowers a sensor to the black depths of a well until sonar waves detect the presence of crude oil that feeds his country’s economy.
Elsewhere in Basra’s oil-rich province, Ayat Rawthan is overseeing the assembly of large drill pipes. These will drill holes in the Earth and send crucial data about rock formations to screens a few meters (feet) away that she will decipher.
The women, both 24, are just a handful of people who have shunned the sad office jobs that were normally handed out to women oil engineers in Iraq. Instead, they chose to become pioneers in the country’s oil industry, and put on hard hats to deal with the grueling work at appliance sites.
They are part of a new generation of talented Iraqi women who are testing the limits imposed by their conservative communities. His determination to find work in a historically male-dominated industry is a striking example of how a growing young population is increasingly at odds with the deep-rooted and conservative tribal traditions that prevail in the southern oil center of the world. ‘Iraq.
The hours that Amjad and Rawthan spend in the oil fields are long and time is unforgiving. They are often asked what they do, as women, there.
“I’m told that the camp environment can only be supported by men,” said Amjad, who spends six weeks each time living on the platform site. “If I gave up, I would give them the right.”
Iraq’s fortunes, both economic and political, tend to dwindle and flow with oil markets. Oil sales account for 90% of state revenue and the vast majority of crude oil comes from the south. A fall in prices causes an economic crisis; a boom feeds state coffers. A healthy economy brings some stability, while instability has often undermined the strength of the oil sector. Decades of wars, civil unrest and invasion have slowed production.
After low oil prices dragged down by the coronavirus pandemic and international disputes, Iraq shows signs of recovery, with January exports reaching 2.868 billion barrels a day at $ 53 a barrel, according to statistics from the Ministry of Petroleum .
For most Iraqis, the industry can be summed up by these figures, but Amjad and Rawthan have a more granular view. Each well presents a set of challenges; some needed more pressure to pump, others were loaded with poison gas. “Every camp wants to go to a new country,” Amjad said.
Given the great importance of the industry for the economy, the petrochemical programs of the country’s engineering schools are reserved for students with the highest grades. Both women were among the top 5% of their graduate career at the University of Basra in 2018.
At school they were impressed by the drilling. For them, it was a new world, with its own language: “smart” had to start drilling operations, a “Christmas tree” was the top of a wellhead and “drug” only meant fat.
Every working day they are deeply immersed in the mysterious affairs that lie beneath the earth’s crust, where they use tools to look at mineral and mud formations, until the precious oil is found. “How to throw a rock into the water and study the ripples,” Rawthan explained.
To work in the field, Amjad, the daughter of two doctors, knew she had to get a job with an international oil company, and to do so she would have to excel. State-owned enterprises were a dead end; there, she would be relegated to office work.
“In my spare time, on my holidays, rest days, I was booking workouts and I signed up for any program I could,” Amjad said.
When the CPECC of China came looking for new contracts, it was the obvious choice. Later, when Schlumberger, based in Texas, sought out wiring engineers, he jumped at the opportunity. The work requires you to determine how much oil can be recovered from a given well. He passed one difficult exam after another to get to the final interview.
When asked if she was sure she could do the job, she said, “Hire me, look.”
In two months, she changed her green hat to a bright white one, which meant her status as a supervisor, no longer in practice, a month faster than usual.
Rawthan, too, knew he would have to work much harder to succeed. Once, when his team had to make a rare “side track” (drilling another hole next to the original), he stayed up all night.
“I didn’t sleep for 24 hours, I wanted to understand the whole process, all the tools, from start to finish,” he said.
Rawthan also now works for Schlumberger, where he later collects data from the wells used to determine the drilling path. It wants to master drilling and the company is a world leader in service.
Family, friends and even teachers were discouraged: what about hard physical work? The scorching heat of Basra? Do you live on the platform site for months? And the desert scorpions that roam the reservoirs at night?
“A lot of times my teachers and classmates laughed,‘ Sure, we’ll see each other around here, ’telling me I wouldn’t be able to do that,” Rawthan said. “But that just pushed me further.”
His parents, however, supported him. Rawthan’s mother is a civil engineer and her father, the captain of an oil tanker that often spent months at sea.
“They understand why this is my passion,” he said. She hopes to help establish a union to bring together like-minded Iraqi women engineers. At the moment, there are none.
The work is not without danger. Protests outside oil fields led by angry local and unemployed tribes can disrupt work and sometimes turn into violence against oil workers. Faced daily by piles of flames that point to Iraq’s apparent oil wealth, others denounce state corruption, poor service delivery and unemployment.
But women are willing to take on these difficulties. Amjad barely has time to even consider them: it was 11pm and they needed her at work.
“Drilling never stops,” he said.