QatarEnergy Brand Guidelines: Qatar’s 1974 State Oil Company, Renamed in 2021

A concession, a decree and three names.

QatarEnergy is the state-owned petroleum and natural gas company of Qatar, based in Doha and owned by the government, and English Wikipedia says it carries out all of the country’s oil and gas activities, from exploration and production to refining, transport and storage. Its story begins well before the company. The first onshore oil concession was awarded on 17 May 1935 to the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, the predecessor of BP, which in October 1936 transferred it to Petroleum Development (Qatar), an associate of the Iraq Petroleum Company, English Wikipedia says. The Dukhan No. 1 well was spudded in October 1938 and struck oil in January 1940.

The Second World War delayed development: the wells were plugged, English Wikipedia says, for fear of their falling into the hands of the Axis powers. Drilling resumed at the end of 1947, and the first crude left the loading dock at Umm Said in December 1949. Offshore, Shell Company–Qatar received a concession dated 29 November 1952.

The state company came with the move to national control in the 1970s. In 1973 the government took a quarter of the onshore and offshore concessions; a 1974 agreement raised the state share to 60 percent; and after a 1975 decree, the government assumed full ownership of the onshore operations in September 1976 and of the offshore ones in February 1977, English Wikipedia says.

The company itself was created by an Emiri decree of 4 July 1974 as the Qatar General Petroleum Corporation, The Peninsula reported in July 2014, when the company marked the decree’s 40th anniversary. QatarEnergy’s own legal page still names a 1974 decree law, with its later amendments, as the document that established the company, set its purpose and set out how it would be managed.

Gas from the North Field.

Natural gas is the core business, the company’s chief executive said in 2021, according to Doha News. English Wikipedia lists its products as including liquefied natural gas, petrochemicals and gas-to-liquids fuels. Its gas-to-liquids output comes from joint ventures: Pearl GTL with Shell and Oryx GTL with Sasol of South Africa.

The North Field offshore is at the centre of its growth. In February 2021, English Wikipedia says, the company, then still Qatar Petroleum, signed an engineering, procurement and construction contract with Chiyoda and Technip for the North Field East expansion, and Shell, TotalEnergies and ConocoPhillips took stakes in a second phase, North Field South. The company operates Qatar’s oil pipeline network, English Wikipedia says, including an offshore network that brings crude to Halul Island for processing and export; Umm Said, Halul Island and Ras Laffan are the country’s three main export terminals. Its subsidiaries include QatarEnergy LNG and Industries Qatar.

Its industry is concentrated in a few places. Qatar’s first refinery was built at Umm Said in 1953, and the Laffan refinery at Ras Laffan came on stream in September 2009, English Wikipedia says. The company says a 2002 Council of Ministers decision assigned it to manage the ports of Halul, Mesaieed, Ras Laffan and Ras Abu Aboud. Its petrochemical arm dates from the same year as the company: the Qatar Petrochemical Company, QAPCO, was established on 9 November 1974 as a joint venture with the French group CdF, English Wikipedia says, and began production in 1981.

The two industrial cities were at the centre of a shutdown in 2026. On 2 March 2026, English Wikipedia says, citing Reuters, Qatar’s Ministry of Defence announced that drones had struck the Ras Laffan Industrial City and the Mesaieed Industrial Area; QatarEnergy halted production of natural gas and associated products and then declared force majeure on its contracts with buyers. No full lifting of that force majeure had been announced at the time of writing.

National oil companies as brands.

National oil companies present themselves differently from the listed majors. Most are owned or controlled by a state, and their identities often sit close to the national story: a flag or national colours placed beside a refinery skyline, a company name that includes the country, and a founding date tied to a concession, a nationalisation or a new state. The imagery tends to repeat across the category: offshore platforms photographed at dawn, drilling rigs in desert or jungle, tanker terminals and pipelines running to the horizon.

The brand also reaches the street. Many national oil companies run fuel retail networks at home, and sometimes abroad, so the identity has to work on a petrol-station canopy, a pump, a lubricant bottle and a forecourt sign as well as on a corporate tower. That puts a premium on a simple mark and a small set of strong colours that read from a moving car.

A third strand is people and the public. Engineering academies, scholarships and graduate programmes appear prominently in their communications, alongside sponsorship of national sports teams, marathons, motor racing, museums and cultural centres. These programmes carry the company name into places far from the oilfield, and they often appear in annual reports next to production figures.

Finally, the financial documents matter more than they used to. As several national oil companies have listed shares or floated subsidiaries, their annual reports, sustainability reports and IPO prospectuses have become major brand documents in their own right, with consistent typography, photography and colour. This guide reads each company through those public materials, separating what independent dated sources document from what the company says about itself.

Blue for gas, green molecules for renewables.

The company has changed its name twice. Doha News reported that Qatar General Petroleum Corporation became Qatar Petroleum in 2001, and that on 11 October 2021 Saad Sherida Al-Kaabi — the minister of state for energy affairs and the company’s president and chief executive — unveiled the name QatarEnergy in Doha. The Peninsula reported that employees heard first, by an email from corporate communications, and that the change came with a new logo and a new slogan, “Your Energy Transition Partner.” The company’s social media handle changed the same day.

The reason given was strategy. Al Jazeera reported the chief executive saying the new name was “more of a reflection of what we’re actually doing,” signalling a focus on energy efficiency and on technology such as capturing and storing carbon dioxide. According to Doha News, the logo has two parts: green molecules that evoke renewable energy and a blue emblem that represents LNG. The company writes its name as one word, QatarEnergy, while Al Jazeera’s headline spaced it as Qatar Energy.

For a design guide, QatarEnergy shows how a rename can be used to state a strategy: a one-word name, a slogan and a logo whose two colours are each given a meaning. Compare ADNOC in Abu Dhabi and Saudi Aramco, two other Gulf state energy companies. For this guide we use a deep gas blue, a molecule green and a sand white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep QatarEnergy’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.