Venturing beyond its mainstay business as an oil and gas exploration and production company, Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has made a modest foray into the literary realm with the publication recently of an Oil & Gas Dictionary - a first-ever for Oman.

The book was launched under the auspices of Undersecretary of Oil & Gas and a member of PDO’s Board of Directors Nasser bin Khamis Al-Jashmi at the Oil and Gas Exhibition Centre in Main Al-Fahal.
Also present were several senior government and company officials.
The 320 page lexicon, researched, compiled and produced entirely in-house - features a comprehensive glossary of oil and gas related terminology with corresponding descriptions provided in Arabic.
Photographs, illustrations, diagrams and footnotes help further elucidate some of the more complex terms listed in the book.
“This event signals PDO’s contribution towards the national effort in marking “Muscat as the capital of Arab Culture 2006,” commented Engineer Abdulamir bin Abdulhussain Al Ajmi, External Affairs & Communications Manager.
“The vocabulary of today’s oil and gas professional is a far cry from what it used to be in the early days of the industry,” he added 
“With the advancement of technology, new oil and gas terms are constantly coming into circulation, often outpacing efforts to have them included in technical dictionaries. 
“Also, for want of dictionaries that provide corresponding equivalents in Arabic, non-English speakers often find themselves confounded by this jargon.  But, with PDO’s new Oil & Gas Dictionary, users can familiarise themselves with the meanings of such terminology as easily as they would check out a word or phrase in a regular dictionary.”
The result of a two-year-long project, the lexicon promises to be a handy reference book not only for many among PDO’s Arabic-speaking staff, but also for professionals working in the Oil and Gas industry throughout the Sultanate.
Thus, terms like Under Balanced Drilling, Production Water, Miscible Gases, Enhanced Oil Recovery, Electrical Prospecting, and so on - all commonplace expressions in today’s jargon-heavy vocabulary of the oil industry - all merit a place in PDO’s lexicon.
The dictionary features thousands of entries, all listed alphabetically.