Sitra

Sitra is Bahrain's fourth-largest island and the site of the Persian Gulf's earliest oil infrastructure outside Iran. In 1932, Bahrain discovered oil; in June 1934, the first crude shipment — 25,000 barrels — left Sitra for Japan; by 1936, a refinery with 10,000-barrel-per-day capacity was operating on the island. That single siting decision locked its future for nine decades. BAPCO's refinery has since expanded beyond 250,000 barrels per day, and hundreds of petroleum supply chain companies — logistics operators, equipment suppliers, maintenance contractors — cluster around it, an economy with the surface complexity of diversification and the deep structure of monoculture. The ecological cost is measured in the adjacent bay. Tubli Bay bordered Sitra with roughly 25 square kilometres of wetland in the 1960s; industrial reclamation, causeway construction, and effluent discharge have reduced it to approximately 13 square kilometres, with mangrove cover collapsing from over 300 hectares to fewer than 50 — a loss exceeding 85%. The bay now holds a marine protected area designation that protects a remnant rather than an ecosystem. Sitra's indigenous Shia Baharna — the island's original fishing and pearl-diving communities, settled here for centuries before oil — inhabit seven historic villages now surrounded by refinery infrastructure. Pearl diving, once the economic foundation, is impossible in contaminated waters; the community traded coastal livelihoods for proximity to industrial employment. The pattern is a metabolic trade-off at geographic scale: the island generates national wealth through high-burn industrial processing while absorbing the toxic byproducts locally, exporting revenue and retaining pollution. First-mover advantage in Gulf petroleum became first-mover liability in environmental exposure — path-dependence that rewards the nation and penalises the place.