Mohammad Gunn

Peter Gunn Theme by Henry Mancini
This tune has been popping up on YouTube lately. It's kind of a cool tune and I enjoy listening to it. Then I noticed that the group of performers is the Qatar Philharmonic Brass, which struck me as a little odd, so a-Googling I go.

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser

The Qatar Philharmonic Orchestra . . . was founded in 2007 by Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the then Emir of Qatar's consort. - Wikipedia

Sheikha got her money the old fashioned way: she married it.

[Emir of Qatar] Hamad seized power in a bloodless palace coup d'état in 1995. During his 18-year rule, Qatar's natural gas production reached 77 million tonnes, making Qatar the richest country in the world per capita with the average income in the country US$86,440 a year per person. - Wikipedia

LNG Rivers, a Liquified Natural Gas carrier

I presume the 77 million tons is an annual figure, which is a goodly quantity in anybodies book. Natural gas can be liquefied and then transported by ship, much like oil is transported in tankers. However, this an inconvenient process as the gas must be cooled to cryogenic temperatures.

Crude Oil Price since 2000

There is a process that can convert natural gas into liquid hydrocarbons. It was discovered in 1925 by some German chemists, but it also a complicated procedure that requires expensive equipment.  The run-up in the price of oil that started around 2005 convinced some people, including the Emir, that building a plant to perform this conversion was a worthwhile idea.

An aerial view of Shell's gas-to-liquid plant in Ras Laffan Industrial City, Qatar

ORYX GTL Plant. Just down the road from the Shell plant in Qatar.

It appears that two of the biggest plants built for performing this conversion are in Qatar, a small country located on a peninsula projecting from the western shore of the Persian Gulf. Billions of dollars have been sunk into these projects which makes them comparable to the big integrated circuit factories that make our computer chips.

Qatar on the Persian Gulf

Temperatures during the summer can be 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not much different than Phoenix Arizona, but the humidity is much higher as you might expect being as it is surrounded by the sea. But then I checked the weather today and it is a balmy 70 degrees. So, for six months of the year it is nice, much like many places on Earth.

Previous appearance of Peter Gunn here.