Select Language

Week in Review

Week 29 in Review: F1 in Schools, green communities, UAV pilot training and more

From green communities to drone pilot training to a rare fossil find, Aramco LIFE had a little something for everything this past week.

 

Here’s a peek at some of our top headlines since Sunday.

 

Aramco F1 in Schools crowns a champion

The 2022 Aramco F1® in Schools World Finals reached its climax late last week with a team of six Australian students crossing the finish line to lift the World Champions trophy at the U.K.’s iconic Silverstone race track.

 

Saudi teams were nominated as finalists for three awards in all, and students from local Saudi schools, the SLK Racing Team, mentored by the King Abdulaziz Center for World Culture (Ithra), also scooped the Women in Motorsport trophy. The award recognized the team’s outstanding female leadership.

 

The five-day science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM)-centered skills contest featured 52 teams from across the globe and bestowed 21 awards.

 

From the desert, a green community has grown

For decades, CS has been working to provide a healthy work and living environment at Aramco. With our Dhahran Nursery at the center, its positive impact fans out across the Kingdom. Dhahran’s 180,000-m2 nursery facilities include 36 greenhouses, 10 of which are for hydroponic cultivation, and 22 shade houses. From here, nature’s bounty is shared across company communities. 

 

Beyond Dhahran, the ‘Udhailiyah Community Farm motivates residents to engage in farming activities by letting a piece of land where employees and dependents are able to plant fruits and vegetables with the help of the facility’s gardeners. And in Jiddah, the CS, as part of the Halophyte Plantation program (focused on plants that survive and prosper in a salty environment), a native tree plantation program is underway across 12 km2

 

Also, at the center of the company’s Green Communities initiative lies CSs’ commitment to plant 1 million trees during each three-year business planning cycle, creating natural carbon sinks. To date, since the initiative commenced in 2018, CS, with partner organizations across the company, has planted 2 million trees.  

 

Aramco and its people celebrate the ‘Id holiday

Aramco communities and Ithra celebrated 'Id Al-Adha with events and activities designed to capture the cultural richness of Makkah Al-Mukarramah in this festive season.

 

For photos from across the Kingdom, check out the link above. 

 

Aramco upskills IT drone pilots 

Aramco's Information Technology (IT) plays a vital role by availing all essential IT services and field resources to support emergency response. One of these services is aerial video live streaming of the incident location.

 

In 2019, the Area Information Technology Department (AITD) started an ambitious initiative to deploy UAV drones across Aramco’s critical locations and ensure workforce preparedness in emergency incidents and drills. Through this initiative, AITD has successfully deployed drones to cover all Aramco operational plants and facilities, and established an in-house drone training program to certify the AITD workforce as drone pilots. 

 

The training program included a practical flying session where participants were taught the various flying techniques and performed hands-on exercises to operate and control the drones safely. Pilots were also trained on the various operational features of the drones to gain confidence in their use. 

 

Geologist responsible for rare Jurassic fossil find 

An Aramco geologist and inventor’s rare Jurassic fossil find from when dinosaurs roamed the Earth has been featured in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences.

 

Abdullah S. Al-Mojel discovered the first Jurassic rudist fossil in Saudi Arabia during his Ph.D. field study between 2014 to 2017. Rudists are a group of extinct box-, tube-, or ring-shaped marine heterodont bivalves.  

 

The scientific details of the fossil were recently published in the Arabian Journal of Geosciences. The Jurassic rudist was found in an outcrop along the side of Wadi Malham, 100 km north of Riyadh, near the famous Tuwaiq escarpment — “the Edge of the World.”