Fossil Fueled Comfort—The History and Cost of Air Conditioning in Bahrain

The first air conditioner to operate in the Gulf was in Bahrain, in the oil town of Awali.

The town had been built by Bahrain Petroleum Company (Bapco)—a creation of the Standard Oil Company of California—after it discovered the Awali oil field in 1932. Initially a temporary settlement, by 1934 the town extended across a plateau north of Jabal Dukhan, where oil was first discovered in the region. As the nearby oil refinery picked up speed, oil specialists from the United States and Britain moved to Awali with their families.

For these newcomers, Awali’s combination of working and living quarters and its public and leisure facilities symbolized the technological advances promised by the oil industry. Air conditioning—which not only cooled but also dehumidified air—was a hallmark of this new, oil-driven lifestyle. Awali’s residents enjoyed air conditioning as early as 1937, even as the technology was not yet common in US households, where the first modern air conditioning system was invented.

In the 1950s, as the town continued to expand, it also featured a centralized cooling system that serviced multiple buildings at once, possibly the first in the world. But behind this story of technological progress is a tale of inequality and ecological degradation, one that continues to haunt Bahrain and the Gulf region today.

 

Early Inequalities in Awali’s Air Conditioning

 

For many British and US specialists in Awali, air conditioning did not simply represent the daily luxuries associated with the arrival of the oil industry, it also reflected their deep-seated anxieties about Bahrain’s climate.

These anxieties were rooted in colonial ideas that viewed Middle Eastern environments as abnormal, degraded and in need of improvement. Some worried about how the heat would affect their physical and mental well-being and that of their families. Bapco and British officials feared discontent among the British workers arising, among other things, from Bahrain’s climate. In the early 1940s, the Political Resident in Bahrain even warned Britain’s Foreign Office that, if Bapco did not give its employees summer breaks, there might be a “general exodus” that would majorly disrupt oil production in Bahrain.[1] Such anxieties help explain why air conditioning was so quickly provided to Awali’s US and European residents.

While Europeans and Americans in Awali enjoyed air-conditioned villas and offices, Bahraini workers labored in the heat. Bapco’s administration justified withholding ice or cool water from them on the grounds that these workers were used to the heat. Most workers were transported daily from villages and towns in what were known as “coolie buses.” The rest were housed just outside the oil camp in palm-frond huts that were not serviced with electricity, fans or air conditioning.

These inequalities triggered labor strikes among Bahraini workers as early as 1938 and reflected an urban scheme of racial segregation. As political scientist Robert Vitalis explains, when constructing oil towns in the Gulf, oil companies adopted segregationist urban plans informed by the US Jim Crow era.[2] Bapco, for example, divided Awali constructions into “Class I” for European and US workers, “Class II” for South Asian workers and “Class III” for Bahraini and other Arab workers. Within this scheme of racial segregation, air-conditioned buildings were solely available to Class I employees, who also had exclusive access to an air-conditioned parlor, cinema, school and a commissary.

British administrators in Bahrain followed suit, adopting a similar strategy as part of the urban reforms they introduced in Bahrain in the early twentieth century. The reforms, supervised primarily by Charles Belgrave, the British advisor to the Bahraini ruler from 1926 to 1957, included a plan for air conditioning private and public buildings in the rest of the country. Influenced by Bapco’s segregationist agendas, Belgrave, in coordination with the Electric Department, ensured that air-conditioning remained a privilege of the few.

At the government hospital, for example, only the ward dedicated to receiving patients from Europe or the United States was air conditioned. The Electric Department also introduced special air conditioning rates that made each unit of electricity eight times cheaper for British and wealthy residents than for the general public. With that pricing formula in place, most Bahrainis could not afford an air conditioner.[3]

 

Upending Vernacular Cooling Practices

 

Contrary to colonial assumptions that Bahrain’s climate was uninhabitable, people in Bahrain had thrived in its weather for centuries. They relied on behavioral and architectural adaptations to the heat that were accessible to all.

Everyone—regardless of social class—had access to certain cooling mechanisms: sleeping on rooftops, taking afternoon siestas and resting in the shade of airy courtyards. Bathing in communal pools and natural springs was also part of people’s daily cooling routines. In an oral history interview conducted in 2019, a former resident of Muharraq recalled frequenting the springs in her early youth: “We used to go to Al-Jalahma spring in Muharraq, and it was divided by a wall, a section for men and another for women and everyone would go. From the wall extended faucets that gushed cold, fresh water. I remember always trying to go close to the faucets because I liked feeling the water pressure. It was so refreshing.”

In addition to these behavioral adaptations, people built houses that were well-adapted to the climate. They used thermally resistant building materials: coral stones fetched from the sea, gypsum made from burned limestone and palm fronds. They further adopted designs such as the courtyard model, which created a central courtyard for shade and enhanced air circulation. Some wealthier households featured wind towers that could funnel air even on a still day. Other elite families and colonial administrates would escape the summer to more temperate climates, for example, Shimla in India (where many British administrators in India would spend their summers). Those of more limited means might make seasonal migrations to the coast, living in temporary, palm-frond huts during the hot season.

Awali broke away with these architectural and behavioral practices. In place of courtyard houses, the planners of Awali favored villas oriented outwards and surrounded by private gardens. They used materials like cement, steel and iron frames. Asphalt, a byproduct of oil, was also used to level roads for gas-guzzling cars. Daily activities were no longer organized according to climatic conditions but based on a fixed work schedule. As such, the afternoon siesta that was part of people’s daily routines was replaced by rigid work timing. At the same time, the drilling work that Bapco conducted in search for oil had adverse effects on Bahrain’s underground water. With urban development projects picking up speed in the aftermath of oil, Bahrain’s natural springs would soon dry up, depriving people of one of the major sources of thermal comfort. These changes came together as an expression of the new modern lifestyle that oil promised to Bahrain.

All of these transformations came at a cost, resulting in a new built environment that was increasingly maladaptive. With cement, concrete and asphalt absorbing and retaining heat, Bahrain would soon experience what became known in the late 1960s as the “urban heat islands” effect.

Belgrave’s urban reforms aligned with this new vision of a modern concrete-and-asphalt city.  In 1937, for instance, he approved of a ban on palm-frond huts, which had long provided people with accessible, cool spaces. For British administrators, the huts were considered unsightly, as they contrasted with the new concrete buildings, and they also presented a fire hazard. British officials further introduced setback regulations that prohibited inhabitants from building their homes on the entire land plot. This restriction impeded the construction of airy, courtyard homes, and the villa layout soon emerged as archetypical housing style in the Gulf.

The gradual displacement of older architectural and behavioral adaptations to the climate locked people in Bahrain into a reliance on energy-intensive and often unaffordable air conditioning.

 

The Costs of Cooling Today

 

Almost a century after Awali’s creation, air conditioning has become a taken-for-granted reality in Bahrain and elsewhere in the Gulf. Its social and ecological burden, however, still looms large.

Indeed, rather than providing universal comfort, air conditioning in Bahrain reflects inequities along new socio-economic lines. While most Bahrainis today enjoy uninterrupted cooling, many migrant workers and limited-income Bahrainis are excluded from the benefits of air conditioning as they labor in the heat: washing cars, selling produce during the summer months, working in factories and, particularly with migrant workers, laboring in the construction industry.

With temperatures rising due to climate change, heat threatens not simply comfort, but survival. In a study on migrant workers in Qatar, Natasha Iskander documents how extreme climate conditions represent the most dangerous threat that workers said they faced. Exposure to thermal stress affects physical and cognitive abilities and leads to chronic conditions, such as kidney and heart failures. These chronic illnesses are not typically recognized as work injuries and instead are designated as natural developments. Spikes in kidney disease among Nepalese workers returning to their home towns from work in Qatar, for example, has prompted medical facilities to partner with dialysis centers in Katmandu.[4]

Responding to these heat considerations, many Gulf states have instituted bans on construction work during the summer months. In Bahrain, work is prohibited from 12 pm to four pm during the months of July and August. But since they are set according to a fixed calendar, these bans, do not take into account actual climate conditions in the rest of the year, when temperatures and humidity levels can still reach unsafe and extreme levels. Moreover, during resting hours, workers might not be provided with comfortable shelters. Many, instead, languish in the heat, seeking shade under trees or against the sides of buildings, depending on the time of day.

The working hour bans are also inadequate as they only address the construction industry, excluding other workers who must labor outside, like security guards, petrol station servicemen and delivery persons.

As the social inequities associated with air conditioning have grown, so too has its ecological cost. While air conditioning offers a cooling solution, it is also heating up the climate through its intensive energy use and reliance on potent refrigerants that contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. This cycle of air conditioning dependency has become difficult to break, especially given the Gulf region’s access to cheap energy. Today, in some Gulf cities, air conditioning accounts for more than 60 percent of domestic electricity consumption during peak usage time in the summer.[5]

In light of these rising energy and environmental concerns, Bahrain, along with other Gulf states, has pushed for more energy-efficient air conditioning solutions, most notably district cooling and solar air conditioning. But these solutions are not without their problems. District cooling—a system that provides chilled water to multiple buildings via underground pipes—relies on the provision of water in a region already facing a water scarcity crisis. Solar air conditioning, meanwhile, is limited by the heavy accumulation of dust on the panels and the large size of panels required.

While Gulf states continue to center air conditioning as the ultimate cooling solution, there are efforts on the ground to move beyond it. Some Gulf architects, for instance, are reintroducing past cooling solutions into their designs, such as the courtyard. Others are experimenting with novel designs that would enhance the thermal performance of buildings without requiring air conditioning, for example using the earth’s cooling capacity by building underground.

Residents in the Gulf have also started to question the future of air conditioning. As one Bahraini resident told me in an interview in 2019, “This cannot last forever. Sometimes, I deliberately try to withstand the discomfort. It’s like I’m training myself to be without air conditioning for the day when we would have to give up this technology.”

Whether this day will ever come remains to be seen. But such conversations reveal a lost faith in the air-conditioned comfort once promised by Awali and the need for more ecologically sustainable and socially just ways of staying cool.

 

[Marwa Koheji is a postdoctoral researcher in the Humanities Fellowship in the Study of the Arab World at New York University Abu Dhabi.]

 

This article appears in MER issue 311 “Post-Fossil Politics.”

 

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Endnotes

 

[1] Coll 30/212 “Essential undertakings in: BAHREIN PETROLEUM COMPANY, etc. Proposed grant of passages to wives & fiancées of employees of B.P.C. Visas for same. And other undertakings,” [‎193r] (388/406), British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/L/PS/12/3955, available in Qatar Digital Library.

[2] Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier (Stanford University Press, 2006).

[3] ‘File 6/13 “Enquiry into the affairs of the State Power House,” British Library: India Office Records and Private Papers, IOR/R/15/2/1222, available in the Qatar Digital Library.

[4] Natasha Iskandar, Does skill make us human?: Migrant workers in 21st-century Qatar and beyond (Princeton University Press, 2021), p. 191.

[5] Mohamed H Elnabawi, “Evaluating the Impact of Energy Efficiency Building Codes for Residential Buildings in the GCC,” Energies 14/23 (2021), p. 1.