This paper discusses an early generation of Arab Oil technocrats as the promoters of a radical Petroleum Arabism in the early 1960s. Their vision which embodied a militant age of decolonisation set a past of dependency on western oil men and corporations against imagined Arab industrial futures of economic and political emancipation centring on the petroleum industry. Using their technical expertise, and their skills as orators, diplomats and writers they popularised knowledge about the oil industry to a large audience as a powerful weapon against multinational corporations and Arab governments. Through the writings and actions of these individuals this paper traces the evolution of a new political and public culture of oil as the beginning of an era of petroleum ‘decolonisation’ under the aegis of regional and international organisations such as the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries and the Arab League, with which these Arab oil technocrats were closely associated. More specifically the paper will focus on: 1. A number of manifestoes on so-called 'Arab oil objectives' by Omar Haliq, ‘Abdullah al-Tariki and Ashraf Lutfi, and their emphasis on the desirability of the development of an Arab-owned petroleum infrastructure as the means to achieve the emancipation of the Arab peoples and to claim sovereign rights over a key national resource; 2. The Arab League-sponsored Arab Petroleum Congresses which started to be organised in 1959 as the key regional and international platforms for this militant Petroleum Arabism, and venues for the popularisation of knowledge about the oil industry through exhibitions, and Arab and international press coverage. It is argued that these congresses were central to the popularisation of a new oil thought (fikriyyah nafitiyyah) that peaked in the late 1960s and early 1970s; 3. OPEC as the venue where knowledge about the Arab World’s petroleum industry started to be collected, systematised and used as a blunt instrument to dissect past patterns of exploitation, to fight western multi-nationals on their own turf, and to break past ‘conspiracies of technical silence’. This paper is based on the writings and documentation produced by Arab technocrats, the proceedings of the Arab Petroleum Congresses, documentation produced by OPEC and the archives of British-controlled oil companies that operated in the region.