WARREN R. TRUE
Chief Technology Editor-LNG/Gas Processing
The little country that could…continues to impress.
Indeed, Qatar—that small country of mostly rock and sand that juts thumb-like from Saudi Arabia into the Arabian Gulf—has ambitions to play roles on the world’s stage that have some observers shaking their heads.
It narrowly missed taking over leadership of the storied Arab League; it leapt fearlessly into the Libya mess; and it even shook up the staid governing body of world football—Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA)—by chasing its presidency.
Football! Now that’s serious business.
But more relevant for our purposes and to this issue’s special report on Worldwide Gas Processing (p. 88) is a somewhat more modest venture at Qatar University: the Gas Processing Center in the Department of Engineering.
Not content merely to establish itself as the world’s leading producer of LNG, Qatar wants to become one of the leading research and training venues for all issues related to natural gas processing.
And it’s part of a wider vision of the country’s future.
‘Qatarization’
Founded in early 2007, the GPC sees its mission partly in furthering a major ambition of the country itself: to contribute to Qatar’s becoming the leading gas capital of the world. Take that, Russia!
The center wants to become “internationally recognized” as a leading organization in gas processing “research, application, and knowledge creation.” It was conceived, its website says, to “conduct research and development in areas pertinent to the consortium members.”
Those members, at least as of 2011, represent virtually all companies doing business in Qatar’s burgeoning natural gas industries: In addition to Qatar Petroleum, QatarGas, and RasGas, there are Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell PLC, and Total SA; Qatar Fertilizer Co. and Qatar Chemical Co. Ltd.; and supply companies GE and Air Products.
The profile of this consortium reveals the breadth of the center’s mission. In an interview last month with Oil & Gas Journal, GPC Director Abdelwahab Aroussi emphasized that, although established in an academic setting, the GPC exists in large part to help industry solve its very concrete and real operational problems.
The center’s overall objective, as its web site states, is to be the “focal point for generating, maintaining, and disseminating information and technology related to Qatar’s gas processing industrial base.” This goal will create an “in-country technical repository and applied research capability” to complement the technologies and technical services provided by the multinational partners of Qatar’s national companies.
A constant in conversations with Qatari natural gas professionals is a recognition of the huge—and necessary—roles played so far by those multinational partners’ expatriate cadres and a fervent desire to migrate many of those functions and responsibilities to native Qataris.
The GPC’s web site calls it the “Qatarization of knowledge and technology.”
But this is not xenophobia.
Education is key
Unlike many developing countries that have found themselves blessed with abundant natural resources, Qatar recognized early that it had to take a long view. Natural resources have a way of running out; markets for them can wax and wane.
Its ruler since 1995, Emir Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani is generally credited as the force behind efforts to establish the country as a major commercial and political force in the region and the wider world. To do that, the country needed to invest in itself…that is, in its people.
Under Al Thani’s leadership and more specifically that of his second wife Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, Qatar has pushed education. Among other initiatives, she was instrumental in establishing Education City, which hosts several US and UK universities along with commercial and social research centers.
Its technical and business training, mainly through campuses of Texas A&M University at Qatar and Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar, complements the extensive engineering training, especially in gas processing, at Qatar University to ensure Qataris have the training and expertise to manage the country’s natural resources for decades.
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