Meet Zahra. ''On the rigs, you have different challenges every day”

Determination, curiosity, and courage are the keys to success for a young female rig supervisor in Saudi Arabia. 

How do you become the first female well site supervisor in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? No need to apply, that title will forever be held by Zahra A. Alsalman. Her path to this drilling point was not easy, but the physics aficionado grasped every opportunity along the way with gusto; all while earning the trust and respect of her coworkers. Now she’s putting her own stamp on well delivery and leadership.

“I believe in individual talents. Although I may be trained by senior supervisors, I will have my own way of doing things. On the rigs, you have different challenges every day,” she says, and you use a range of experiences to work as a team to deliver the well safely. “The rig life,” she adds, “is very exciting, and fascinating.”

Alsalman always wanted to be an engineer, but she wasn’t sure what kind until a high school physics lesson on electricity. She was instantly hooked. She applied for scholarships to study electrical engineering, and instead was offered a medical related scholarship. Undaunted, she merged some electrical engineering courses with her medical major at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in the United States. 

After two years she was successful in her requests to have the scholarship applied to her chosen field. “I was so happy that I could graduate with the qualification I wanted,” she recalls.

A career path that starts at the wireline

A degree is no guarantee you’ll land the job of your dreams. After graduating in 2017, Alsalman returned to Saudi Arabia to a few job offers in engineering, but none as electrical engineer. She applied for a wireline services role at Baker Hughes without really knowing what it entailed. The interviewer took her on a tour of the wireline workshop to gauge her reaction to the environment. 

“It was a really hot day, and the workshop employees were all male,” she recalls. “I remember entering the lab and seeing the oscilloscope and the test equipment and thinking, ‘Oh my god, that’s what I want to do. I can do this!’”

Wirelines are electrical cables that are lowered into oil or gas wells to gather and transmit data about the well formation. The conductor cables are connected to downhole logging tools. They can measure properties such as resistivity, conductivity, formation pressure and wellbore dimensions. This in turn helps drillers and engineers make real-time decisions on how to operate the well and can also be used to facilitate well interventions.

Alsalman quickly proved herself on the wireline team. She advanced to more complex tasks and tools, all while earning the respect of her colleagues. 

“It was very, very good. I would wake up every morning eager to get to work,” she says. “It might sound funny, but a lot of what we did was problem solving, so I was excited to see what problem we were solving today.”

First: a thirst for knowledge

A few years into her wireline role, Alsalman was nominated for the ASPIRE Early Careers Development Program. Among the required qualities, candidates must “be inquisitive and outwardly present a thirst for more knowledge.” Alsalman was a perfect fit. 

“I always wanted to know the business from another perspective,” Alsalman says “I knew wireline, but I was targeting Integrated Services to understand the workings of wellsite operations more deeply.” 

The ASPIRE program provides the opportunity to work in a variety of environments with two rotations of six months and one of 12 months - all in different countries. ASPIRE is an invitation to innovate. And innovate she did.

Alsalman first landed in Houston, Texas, in March 2020 just as the COVID pandemic went global. “There was chaos at the supermarket, and I didn’t really understand what was happening,” she says. Within a couple of weeks, she was working from “home” on a project to develop an enterprise solution that could be applied to several Baker Hughes product lines. 

She designed an asset tracker, a radio frequency identification (RFID) scanner, which uses radio waves to map the whereabouts of tagged objects — in this case all the tools on a site and in the field. Her innovation also identifies when tools need maintenance. 

“It was a very interesting time, to move away from my technical operations role, trying to figure out how office-based people worked, without being in the office. I got to know about the business and processes from the headquarters side. It was great!”

Alsalman returned to Saudi Arabia for her one-year rotation in a commercial service delivery role in Integrated Solutions. The Kingdom has one of the largest proven oil reserves in the world and currently operates over 200 rigs, making it an ideal location to gain new professional experiences in the industry.

A taste of success

Her third program rotation was in Norway where she worked on one of the most revolutionary projects in the industry — Equinor’s Integrated Operations Level 3 (IO3). The IO3 project implemented remote drilling at the Askepott offshore rig (and subsequently deployed to the rest of Equinor’s rigs), from the company’s Integrated Remote Operations Centre onshore in the city of Stavanger. The transformation involved multi-skilling a reduced offshore workforce to cover all necessary tasks on the rig, and the cultural and technical shift to remote operations.

“I simultaneously worked in two areas on the Equinor project,” says Alsalman. For my personal development I wanted to get as much experience as possible offshore, so I handled a service pusher role on different rigs. And I was project manager for IO3 — an onshore office-based role.”

She says, it was “a great collaboration” between the three companies, Equinor, Baker Hughes and rig contractor Transocean. “We achieved great success, particularly in executing the first remotely operated well cementing job in Norway and training all the field professionals to achieve validation certificates in their new multi-skilled roles.”

A welling of people skills

Alsalman became well site supervisor when she completed the program. She is also responsible for operations from ‘Day One’ of breaking ground to the handing over of the completed well to ARAMCO, Saudi Arabia’s national oil company. “I’m supervising all ongoing operations from spudding [starting to drill] to completing the well, as well as planning ahead in terms of service providers, tools and logistics for each job.”

She says her role is more about working with people than hands-on execution of any project. “It will show exactly what I’m missing in terms of the soft skills required to be a good leader. We are different people with different talents and experiences, and accepting and respecting everyone is the bare minimum required as a people leader.”

Of course, Alsalman is not shooting for the bare minimum. 

“I know what I want: one day I want to be a leader in our oilfield services and equipment business segment,” she says. “I want to gain an understanding of the business on the field side from A to Z, so I will never assume stuff, because I’ve been there, I know what’s happening and how to help the people at the front line. You must understand the people, the engine of the company, to implement a good leadership style.”