Oil built the modern Middle East. Where is its museum?

My colleague James Drummond, AGBI Editor-in-Chief, rounded off a recent magisterial survey of the great museums of the Middle East with a call for a museum of oil.

Now I swear we have not been colluding on this, but great minds do think alike: I’ve believed for some time that there is a glaring need for such a long-overdue project. 

The Arabian Gulf needs a proper monument to the commodity that has been the source of all its prosperity, the engine of economic growth for decades, and a way of life for many of its citizens and expatriates.

Not a mere gallery, not a heritage wall, not a timeline printed on vinyl along the wall of a conference centre. I mean a real museum worthy of the stuff that built the modern Middle East, funded the skyscrapers, financed the sovereign wealth funds, and turned this sun-baked peninsula into the cockpit of global energy.

For the truth is that other parts of the world take their energy heritage more seriously than the region that actually changed history with it.

Norway has the Norwegian Petroleum Museum in Stavanger, which visitors describe as a handsome building on the waterfront, complete with offshore rig models, seismic displays, and interactive rooms where school children learn how the North Sea reshaped their country. It seems serious, thoughtful and deeply rooted in national memory.

The Americans do it too. Galveston’s Ocean Star Oil Rig Museum is built into a decommissioned jack-up rig. It smells faintly of diesel and ambition, they say. Not far away, the Oil Patch museums of Texas and Oklahoma tell the wild, muddy story of gushers and roughnecks and the workers who began the process that has made the USA into the world’s biggest producer.

Azerbaijan – where the first modern oil boom began (somebody please tell the Americans) – pays homage to the black gold. There is the marvellous museum in the Taghiyev House in Baku, elegant and slightly dusty, with grainy pictures of Stalin-lookalike workers, and the superb Villa Petrolea, where the Nobel brothers planned wells that financed laboratories, literature and peace prizes.

Meanwhile in Vienna, Opec has for decades floated the ambitious idea of a permanent oil museum, but nothing substantial has ever materialised. That is a sad state of affairs, given the exotic dramas and intrigue that always surrounded the industry in the Austrian capital. It would be living history.

But what of the Arabian Gulf, the epicentre of the story?

Saudi Arabia, now virtually synonymous with oil the world over, has the modest heritage centre at Well Number 7 in Dhahran – hugely significant and much photographed, but in reality a slightly underwhelming montage of spigots, wheels and valves.

Frank Kane

There is also a charming curiosity of a mini-museum in a house within the original Aramco compound – lovely in its way, but not remotely commensurate with the scale of the Saudi oil legacy.

The UAE, for all its engineering audacity, is similarly quiet on the subject. Abu Dhabi controls hundreds of billions in hydrocarbons and stages the biggest energy conference, Adipec, in the world. Yet – no museum.

No permanent monument to the molecule that built – and continues to build – huge conurbations, fills the sovereign wealth vaults, and has turned the UAE’s desert coast into the Riviera of the Gulf.

Next year Riyadh will confirm its position as the global capital of energy. It will host both the World Petroleum Congress and the World Energy Congress in the same calendar year. In April and October the Saudi capital will be the ground zero of the global energy business. 

Further reading:

• Museums of the Middle East: the one glaring omission
• Abu Dhabi’s cultural ambitions take shape
• A museum facing the world with its back to the city

What better moment to announce the creation of the world’s definitive oil museum as the next mega-project on the road to Vision 2030?

Not a retrospective mausoleum, but a national institution – a Louvre of liquids, a MoMA of molecules, a Hermitage of hydrocarbons – where school groups run simulators, where rig hands bring grandchildren, where transition technologies sit beside drilling mud samples and core cuttings from Ghawar, the “field of dreams”.

A museum with a life-size offshore rig, a working carbon capture exhibit, maybe a gallery of energy forecasts that got it hilariously wrong, and an archive of events that moved global markets and sparked wars, invasions – and supplied the world with the fuel essential for economic growth.

Or Abu Dhabi could seize the initiative and build it on Saadiyat, next to the Louvre and Guggenheim, completing a cultural trilogy: art, modernity and the resource that paid for both. Something along the lines of the spectacular Zayed National Museum which opened to much fanfare this week.

The Middle East should celebrate its oil heritage with pride and a sense of achievement as a defining factor, perhaps the defining factor, in its history – and not be deterred by environmental guilt shaming about the industry.  

PS – I think we can safely leave the Museum of Global Gas to Doha.