It is about 10 kilometres (6.2 miles) south of the border to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, which is a straight line drawn in the desert.

However, due to the very large number of wells required to achieve a minimum capacity of 250,000 bd of commercial production, the field was not developed at that time.

A 386 km road had to be built across the dunes followed by a large landing strip to accommodate cargo jets.

[3] The Shaybah oilfield has estimated 'extra light' crude oil reserves of over 14 billion barrels (2.2×109 m3) and 25 trillion cubic feet (710 km3) of natural gas.

Water occurs below and gas above the oil zone, so horizontal drilling extending up to 12 km were employed to increase production efficiency up to 12,000 barrels per day.