The Middle East Energy

The year 2015 was a challenging one for Qatar’s oil and gas industry. The state saw its hydrocarbons revenue, which accounts for a significant portion of its income, significantly impacted as an ongoing global oil price plummet accelerated, with crude oil losing over two-thirds of its value between June 2014 and January 2016. Redundancies,...

While Abu Dhabi continues to diversify its economy, oil and gas nevertheless remain the emirate’s mainstays, representing more than half of GDP in 2015 and accounting for more than 90% of government revenues, according to figures from the Statistics Centre - Abu Dhabi (SCAD). Despite the impact of low oil prices on the sector, the government...

After several years of bumper oil prices, including what at one point seemed a new normal of $100 per barrel, crude oil-producing nations now have to accept that energy markets are once more interesting. However, while significant attention has been focused on the price war between OPEC and US shale, the current slump in prices is also...

Despite being home to the world’s seventh-largest natural gas reserves, with 215trn standard cu feet (scf), according to the “BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2015”, the UAE has been a net importer of gas since 2008. Indeed, according to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), over the past decade the UAE’s imports of natural gas...

For the past two years Abu Dhabi’s onshore oil industry has been slowly transitioning to a new era. As of January 2014, the concession agreements that had defined the sector from its earliest beginnings more than 75 years ago are no more.

With many of the emirate’s onshore oilfields reaching maturity, plans to expand future production to 3.5m barrels per day (bpd) will mean a much bigger role for the emirate’s offshore sector. Indeed, the next five years will see more than $25bn invested in offshore production, as the government hopes to reach the 3.5m bpd goal by 2017,...