The onshore foreland on Mesozoic rift basin is geographically defined by the eponymous Rub' al Khali and covers the regions of Najran and Riyadh and the Eastern Province.

The stratigraphy of the basin ranges from Proterozoic to recent and comprises various cycles of clastic and carbonate sediments separated by regional unconformities.

The stratigraphic column contains various levels of source rock formations, and reservoirs and seals are common in the late Paleozoic and Mesozoic succession.

The stratigraphy of the Rub' al Khali Basin ranges from the Neoproterozoic, locally referred to as "Infracambrian", to recent deposits.

[21] Throughout the earlier periods of the Paleozoic, the intracratonic basin went through an extensional tectonic phase, which ended with a regional Carboniferous unconformity, representing the Hercynian orogenic compressional stage.

[4] During the early Mesozoic, this tectonic quiescent stage remained active, laying down the majority of the sedimentary sequence, including the main reservoirs of the succession.

[23] To the east of the Rub' al-Khali Basin, this resulted in the obduction of the Semail Ophiolite, an oceanic crustal sequence which today is widely studied in the Oman Mountains.

The active compression caused by the Alpine orogeny and represented in the Middle Eastern territories by the Zagros fold and thrust belt, continued in the late Paleogene and Neogene, with the main phase of uplift lasting from about 25 to 18 Ma.