"Welcome to city of red sand," reads the sign at the entrance of a sprawling complex carved amid the towering dunes of Saudi Arabia's vast Rub al-Khali, or Empty Quarter, desert.
But Shaybah is more than a state-of-the-art living quarters adorned by trees for some 650 people in a remote desert corner that turns into a breathtaking sight when the sun sets on a glowing, seemingly endless sea of sand.
Here, on top of some 15 billion barrels of proven oil reserves - more than a drop in the ocean of Saudi Arabia's estimated total reserves of about 260 billion barrels - sits the first, and so far sole, oilfield development in the desert that covers roughly a quarter of the kingdom.
The Shaybah mega-project has since its completion by state-run Saudi Aramco in July 1998 been producing oil to the tune of 600,000 barrels per day (bpd) for less than a dollar a barrel, according to officials at the facility, some 800 kilometers (500 miles) southeast of the eastern oil center of Dhahran.
The "depletion" - one billion barrels up to December 2003 - has been compensated by the addition of an estimated 2.4 billion barrels to the initial proven reserves of 15.7 billion, they said.
The area also has gas reserves of 25 trillion cubic feet (650 million cubic metres), so far untapped.
The development, which cost 2.5 billion dollars, boasts three gas-oil separation plants (GOSP). The oil is carried to Abqaiq south of Dhahran by a 640-kilometer (400-mile) pipeline.
"Processing and treatment mostly takes place here and the rest is done at Abqaiq's processing facilities" before the oil is shipped out, said Mohammad Hatlani, operations superintendent of the Shaybah project, a link in a chain that makes Saudi Arabia the world's top crude exporter.
Two major gas-related projects have come on stream after Shaybah - the massive Hawiyah gas plant in the Eastern Province, completed in 2002, and the Haradh natural gas and oil project, 280 kilometers (170 miles) southwest of Dhahran, inaugurated in January.
On Sunday, Saudi Arabia signed three agreements with four international firms to explore for and produce gas in the northern part of Rub al-Khali, four months after concluding a similar deal covering south Rub al-Khali with a consortium led by Royal Dutch/Shell and Total.
Depending on the finds, the deals raise the prospect that Shaybah "city" will be replicated in other spots of the windswept desert where summer shade temperatures can top 55 degrees Centigrade (more than 130 Fahrenheit), intruding into the privacy of bedouins who for centuries have been the only inhabitants of the area.
For the moment, the nomads appear to be coexisting reasonably well with their new neighbors at Shaybah, an all-male population of Saudi Aramco personnel and employees of firms contracted to do various jobs at the self-sufficient facility.
"They come from time to time and go. Sometimes we give them fresh water," Hatlani said.
But these are bedouins who have caught up with the age.
"They come with their camels but also their four-wheel-drive cars. And they drive better than us," Hatlani said.
Not that they can afford to lose control of the wheel if they take on the dunes, some of which are more than 200 meters (660 feet) high.
Almost 100 million cubic feet of sand had to be removed to allow construction of Shaybah's airfield, a 90-minute flight from the capital Riyadh, officials said.
On land, the nearest link to a living community lies some 385 kilometers (240 miles) to the east, at the Bat'ha border crossing between Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
Which means that at the end of a hard-working day, Shaybah's residents turn to their in-house recreation facilities - from a basket-cum-football court to a restaurant fittingly called "The Oasis" - to while away the hours in their no woman's land.
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