One Hundred Years of Middle Eastern Oil

Professor E. Roger Owen (Harvard University)

Oil was found at Masjed Soleyman in southwestern Iran on 26 May 1908, and three years later was piped down to a newly built refinery at Abadan on the Iranian side of the Shatt al-rab, not many miles below Basra [1]. Its global importance was immediately recognized, not just by the Admiralty in London, looking for new sources of supply for its oil-fired battleships, but in other European capitals as well – leading to a brief British-German-Turkish skirmish for control of the pipeline at the start of World War I [2].

Oil also played an important role in the struggle after the war over the future of the Ottoman province of Mosul, where a large oil field was eventually discovered in 1927 at Baba Gargur near Kirkuk in the new, British-mandated Iraq. Oil was next found in the Persian Gulf, beginning with Bahrain in 1931; there were subsequent discoveries in Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Trucial States (Abu Dhabi and Dubai), and Oman. By 1960 the smaller Gulf states were producing 15% of the world’s oil, with another 10% or so coming from Iraq and Iran [3]. By 1970 this had risen to 30% [4].