1925·11Muscat
A camel survey finds nothing
Geologists George Lees and K. Washington Gray leave Muscat under an Anglo-Persian licence and return without conclusive evidence of oil. PDO dates its own prehistory from here.
Petroleum Development Oman1937 — 2026
89
A concession was signed in 1937 and for a quarter of a century it produced nothing. Most of the partners gave up and walked away. What was left found oil at Yibal in 1962, exported the first cargo in 1967, and became the company that funded modern Oman — and then did the harder thing: handed itself over to Omanis. Ninety-one per cent of PDO is Omani today. In April 2024 it appointed the first Omani managing director in its history.
Concession 1937, Iraq Petroleum Company First oil Yibal, April 1962 First export 27 July 1967 Ninetieth anniversary 2027
Petroleum Development Oman is the only institution in this collection that spent its first twenty-five years failing. The Iraq Petroleum Company took a concession over Oman and Dhofar in 1937 and drilled, on and off, for a generation without finding anything commercial. In 1960 the partners lost patience: BP, the French company and the American interests all sold out, leaving Shell holding eighty-five per cent of a company with no oil.
Two years later they found it. Yibal, April 1962, then Natih in 1963 and Fahud in 1964. A 270-kilometre pipeline was laid to a new terminal at Mina Al Fahal, and on 27 July 1967 the tanker Mos Prince sailed for Japan with 543,800 barrels at a dollar forty-two. Oman became an oil exporter three years before Sultan Qaboos came to the throne, and everything that followed — the roads, the schools, the hospitals, the country as it now exists — was paid for out of what that pipeline carried.
The government took twenty-five per cent in 1973 and sixty per cent the following year, and in 1980 PDO was re-registered as an Omani company. But the ownership was the easy part. The harder project ran for forty years and has a name: Omanisation. A company built and run by foreigners set out to replace them with Omanis, function by function, from the drill floor upward. It reached about seventy per cent by the late 1990s and ninety-one per cent by 2023. In April 2024 Dr Aflah bin Said Al Hadhrami became the first Omani to lead the company in eighty-seven years.
That is the knowledge PDO holds that nobody else in this collection does. Aramco did the same thing a generation earlier, and the people who did it there are dead. PDO's are not.
What follows is the eighty-nine years as they can be documented — and it says where the record stops, which for the first seventy years of leadership is almost everywhere.
Era I
1937 — 1960
Twenty-three years of surveys and dry holes, until most of the owners give up and leave.
1925·11Muscat
Geologists George Lees and K. Washington Gray leave Muscat under an Anglo-Persian licence and return without conclusive evidence of oil. PDO dates its own prehistory from here.
1937
The Iraq Petroleum Company takes a 75-year concession over Oman and Dhofar and forms Petroleum Development (Oman and Dhofar) Ltd. Four shareholders at 23.75 per cent each — Shell, Anglo-Iranian, the French CFP and the American Near East Development Corporation — with Partex at 5 per cent. This is the date PDO counts from, and it marked its 85th in May 2022.
1948Dhofar
René Wetzel and Mike Morton survey Dhofar and advise rejecting it as unprospective.
1951
The Dhofar concession lapses and the company is renamed Petroleum Development (Oman) Ltd, dropping “and Dhofar”.
1954–60Fahud
Operation DeF pushes inland from Duqm Bay toward Jebel Fahud. Every well drilled through 1960 is dry.
1960
BP, CFP and the American interests all exit, leaving Shell with 85 per cent and Partex with 15. A quarter of a century of investment written off — two years before the discovery.
Era II
1962 — 1973
Oil at last, a pipeline across the desert, and a country that becomes an exporter.
1962·04Yibal
Oil and gas in Cretaceous limestone at Yibal. Natih follows in 1963, Fahud in 1964. PDO’s own site dates discovery to 1956; every other source says 1962. Treat 1962 as correct.
1967·07·27Mina Al Fahal
The tanker Mos Prince sails for Japan with about 543,800 barrels at $1.42. A 270 km pipeline from the Fahud fields to a new terminal made it possible. Oman becomes an oil exporter.
1967
CFP repurchases a 10 per cent stake, reducing Partex to 5. Shell remains at 85.
1970
The production base on which the new Sultanate’s development was funded.
1972Block 6
Heavy oil, and the field that would later carry PDO’s enhanced-recovery experiments. Production begins in 1984.
Era III
1973 — 1980
The state takes control, and the company becomes Omani in law before it becomes Omani in fact.
1973·12
Part of the OPEC-era wave of host-government participation.
1974·07
Backdated to 1 January 1974. The resulting structure — Government 60, Shell 34, Total 4, Partex 2 — has held essentially unchanged ever since.
1980
By royal decree, PDO becomes an Omani limited liability company rather than a foreign joint venture, and adopts the ammonite logo it still uses.
Era IV
1981 — 2000
A company built by foreigners sets out to replace them, function by function, and largely succeeds.
c.1981Muscat
Born in Zanzibar in 1939, schooled in Britain from thirteen, an LSE graduate. He rises from employee relations manager to HR director and holds the role until about 1999, building the systems and the culture that took Omanisation to roughly seventy per cent by his retirement. He died in 2021.
1986
PDO is reported as an early leader, achieving recovery rates around three times conventional methods.
1988
Brought into production.
1989–93
620,000 bpd in 1989; 689,000 in 1990, then thought to be the technical limit; 733,000 by 1993.
1999Saih Rawl
The central processing plant and the gas pipeline to Qalhat LNG are commissioned. PDO becomes the first exploration and production company in the Middle East certified to ISO 14001.
2000Qalhat
Oman becomes a gas exporter as well as an oil one.
Era V
2001 — 2019
Mature fields in decline force PDO into techniques nobody else was using at that scale, including the sun.
2005–07Qarn Alam
A documented technical first, recorded in the Society of Petroleum Engineers literature. The exact commissioning date could not be established.
2011·03Muscat · Marmul · Qarn Alam
Around four hundred employees protest at headquarters demanding pay parity with other Gulf national oil companies — “we are the least-paid oil workers in the Gulf” — with simultaneous stoppages at Marmul and Qarn Alam. The first strike at a Gulf national oil company during the 2011 uprisings. PDO staff went on to form a union with regular access to the oil minister.
2015–18Amal
A $600m solar enclosure with GlassPoint, 1 GW thermal, 36 glasshouse modules, up to 6,000 tonnes of steam a day, saving about 1.6 TWh of gas a year. First steam November 2017, inaugurated February 2018.
2018·09Marmul
80,000 cubic metres a day of water treatment, 17,500 of polymer injection, adding about 8,000 barrels a day.
2019Rabab Harweel
Oil, gas and sulphur recovery combined, around 500 million barrels of oil equivalent. Production starts.
2020·05
The company that built Miraah goes into voluntary liquidation after Shell and Mitsui withdraw funding. PDO says it is equipped to run the solar plant itself.
Era VI
2020 — 2026
Record output, a digital operations centre, and after eighty-seven years an Omani in charge.
2020Amin
Commences operations.
2024·04Muscat
The first Omani to lead PDO in its history. Previously chief executive of AlShawamikh Oil Field Services, with earlier service at Oman Refinery, Schlumberger, Occidental and BP. He follows Raoul Restucci (2010–2021) and Steve Phimister (2021–2024).
2024
About 1.1 million barrels of oil equivalent a day in total — 62 per cent of Oman’s crude and condensate — on revenue above $22.5 billion.
2026·05·12Muscat
Sultan Haitham bin Tariq opens an integrated remote-operations centre managing 227 producing oil fields, 39 gas fields, 29 production stations, more than 13,000 active wells and 15 power plants. It is staffed by 279 people at 95 per cent Omanisation.
2027
PDO counts from 1937 and marked its 85th in 2022. Nothing has been announced.
Aramco did this a generation earlier and the people who did it are gone. PDO’s are not.
Omanisation · 1981 to 2024 · seventy per cent to ninety-one
The difficult chapters
An oil company that has run for eighty-nine years does not have a clean record, and a history that pretends otherwise is not worth reading.
From 1937 to 1960 the concession produced nothing commercial. Three of the four original owners wrote off their investment and left, two years before the discovery. What that decision looked like from inside is recorded nowhere.
Four hundred workers at headquarters, stoppages at two fields, and the first strike at a Gulf national oil company during the uprisings of that year. The wage settlement that ended it was never published. The union it produced still exists.
The head of PDO’s tenders committee was tried alongside two executives of the contractor Galfar over an allegation of a bribe to extend a 2011 contract, as part of a wider Omani anti-corruption drive. Proceedings were still running in late 2018. The final verdict could not be established.
PDO’s flagship renewable project lost its builder within three years of inauguration, when GlassPoint went into liquidation after its funders withdrew. PDO kept operating Miraah. No performance data has been published since.
No managing director of PDO between 1937 and Raoul Restucci’s appointment in 2010 could be found in any public source. Seven decades of leadership, including the discovery, the first export and the nationalisation, entirely unattributed.
Search for PDO alumni in either language and nothing comes back. OPAL, the industry body, convenes sitting managing directors quarterly — it is a trade association for the working, not a home for those who left.
The people who built it
Two geologists from 1925, one HR director, and three managing directors from the last fifteen years. For eighty-nine years and nine thousand employees, that is the entire public roster. Nobody who found the oil, laid the pipeline, loaded the first cargo or negotiated the nationalisation is named anywhere.
The gap between 1937 and 2010 is not an oversight in this list. It is the finding. Filling it would take PDO’s own archive, Shell’s corporate history, or — faster and better — asking the people who were there.
Eighty-nine years, in figures
679,922 barrels of oil and condensate a day in 2024, about 1.1 million barrels of oil equivalent in total; a peak of 1.293 million boe/d in 2016. Around 9,000 direct employees from 64 nationalities. Omanisation ran 84 per cent in 2019, 86 in 2020 and 91 in 2023. Field and well counts vary between sources and have grown: the 2026 Bait Al Haitham figures give 227 oil fields, 39 gas fields and more than 13,000 active wells.
What is not recorded
These are not marginal questions. They are the company’s largest decisions, and the answers exist in the memories of people who are still reachable.
Seventy-three years and not one managing director named in public. Not through the dry decades, not through the discovery, not through the nationalisation.
The percentages are published. The method is not: how the training was designed, which functions resisted, what it cost, who was replaced and how it was handled.
The apprenticeship and vocational system that produced the Omani workforce has no founding dates, no named leadership and no published account anywhere.
Three of four owners quit two years before the discovery. What they knew, what they argued, and who stayed — not recorded.
27 July 1967, one tanker, 543,800 barrels. The pipeline, the terminal and the loading exist as a date and a number. Nobody involved has been quoted.
PDO said it would keep the solar plant running. No output or performance figure has appeared since 2020.
None of this is obscure. That is what the founding directory is for.
Why this anniversary is different
PDO counts from 1937 and marked its eighty-fifth in May 2022, so the arithmetic is its own. As of September 2026 no programme has been announced.
The window matters more here than at most institutions. Anyone who worked on the first export in 1967 is in their eighties or gone. Suleiman Al-Lamki, who built the Omanisation programme, died in 2021 without recording how he did it. The generation he trained — the Omanis who took over the drilling, the engineering and the management through the 1980s and 1990s — is retiring right now. In April 2024 one of them became the first Omani to run the company.
And PDO’s knowledge travels further than most. Every country that hosts a foreign-operated resource company and wants its own people running it eventually is asking a question PDO has spent forty years answering in practice. Aramco answered it too, a generation earlier, and can no longer be asked.
Across exploration and drilling, production and process engineering, the fields at Yibal, Fahud, Marmul, Qarn Alam and Harweel, the Mina Al Fahal terminal, HSE, training, commercial and leadership — in Oman and among the expatriates who worked there.
One structured hour each. Not nostalgia — method. How a field was brought on, how steam injection was made to work in fractured carbonate, how an Omani was trained into a role a foreigner had held, and what they would do differently.
Tagged to a person, a period, a function and a milestone, so the next country trying to nationalise a technical workforce can find the answer rather than reinvent it.
Compiled from PDO’s own history pages and published results, Oman Observer, Muscat Daily, Times of Oman, Atheer, Attaqa, AGBI, S&P Global, GeoExpro on the exploration years, Ericsson and GlassPoint corporate material, Global Energy Monitor on Amal and Rabab Harweel, PTTEP’s 2019 acquisition of Partex, OPAL’s own profile, and contemporaneous reporting of the 2011 strike and the Galfar proceedings. Where sources disagree — the discovery year, the field and well counts, the managing directors before 2010 — this account gives what is documented and says where the record runs out.
The concession dates from 1937; first oil was 1962 and first export 1967. They are not the same event. This is an independent alumni project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a property of Petroleum Development Oman.