Natural Resources

The energy sector, particularly its vast reserves of oil and natural gas, including the third-largest known natural gas reserve globally, made possible by its exclusive access to the North Field reserve. It’s a small island, 100 miles from north to south and 50 miles from west to east (Adegbamigbe, 2022). With the attached North field reserve, a reserve roughly equivalent in area to the size of Qatar, Qatar has exclusive access to some of Earth’s most essential natural resources in oil and gas. Qatar is fortunate to be the possessor of the third largest known reserve of natural gas in the world, behind only Russia and Iran, officially tapping into the offshore reserves in 1971 (ITA, 2023). The Persian Gulf provided fishes such as groupers (hamour), Spanish mackerel (kan’ad), rabbitfish (safi fish), tiger shrimp (rubiyan) and blue swimmer crabs along with pearls from oysters as resources available for trade (Ataullah, 2023). Qatar has since become an indispensable energy supplier with vast reserves and very low cost (Krauss, 2022). 

Qatar has increased its wealth as a result of its strategic focus on the gas industry, its shared North field reserve with Iran, and its transformation into a powerful energy supplier. The North field reserve is shared by Qatar and Iran, creating an interrelation and trading connection between not only these two countries, but also to easily accessible neighboring countries in Asia such as China, Japan, South Korea amongst others across the globe (Al- Tamimi, 2023).  Qatar benefits by providing an indispensable natural product to be outsourced/exported out the country with supply agreements to companies in countries that don’t have access to essential sources of energy (Danger, 2021). Qatar has developed and evolved its infrastructure and production of oil and gas to transform the potent energy supplier of the world it strived to be (Calabrese, 2023). Advanced strategic investments has allowed Qatar to rise from being one of the poorest nations in the world to now being one of the wealthiest, an essential contributor of the working international trade system.

Fig 2—North Field In Qatar (Dargin, 2021).