Umm Saʿīd

Umm Saʿīd, town and port situated in Qatar, on the east coast of the Qatar Peninsula, in the Persian Gulf. It was established in 1949 as a tanker terminal by the Qatar Petroleum Company on an inhospitable, previously uninhabited site, along the sabkhah (salt flat) terrain characteristic of the coast.

Qatar’s onshore petroleum fields, the Dukhān formations, lie on the opposite (west) coast of the peninsula, along Salwā Bay, which separates Qatar from the main landmass of Arabia. Because coral reefs at the mouths of the bay prevented access by oceangoing tankers, the company laid a pipeline, 49 miles (79 km) long, in the 1940s across the peninsula to Umm Saʿīd, where tank farms and an artificial deepwater port were built. The main administrative and engineering headquarters of the company are also located there. Umm Saʿīd is the site of the country’s first major oil refinery, which was built in the 1960s and was later expanded and linked to additional refineries. In 1998 Umm Saʿīd was officially designated an industrial city.

Umm Saʿīd, the only deepwater port in Qatar for more than 20 years, handled not only the export of oil but the import of basic construction and industrial equipment, as well as consumer goods. These imports, financed by petroleum revenues, were used to convert the country’s economy from a subsistence level to that of a modern industrial and commercial state. The opening of the deepwater port at the capital city of Doha in the early 1970s lessened dependence on Umm Saʿīd as a general port. Industrial development there includes a plant producing ammonia and nitrogen fertilizers and a fully automated flour mill. Pop. (2015) 37,548; (2020) 29,330.