Roughly a third of the twenty-one experts in petroleum microbiology who gathered at the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR) on 15–17 January 1979 were based in the Middle East. The remainder hailed from Western Europe, the USA and Japan, mostly from the research departments of some of the world's biggest oil and petrochemical companies, among them British Petroleum, Imperial Chemical Industries, Phillips Petroleum and the Mitsubishi Gas Chemical Company. The Proceedings of the OAPEC Symposium on Petroprotein, published the following year, suggest a distinctly torch-passing tone to the conference. By 1979, the big international companies were almost all abandoning the petroprotein business, having judged their attempts to synthesise food supplements by fermenting yeast or bacteria on hydrocarbon feedstocks to have been scientifically and technically successful but impossible to make profitable. Emil Malick, President and CEO of Provesta Foods (a division of the US-based Phillips Petroleum), captured the state of this field succinctly in his presenta-tion. Provesta's microbial protein supplement would not, his company had concluded, be able to compete with prices for soya or fishmeal as a protein source for the foreseeable future. But, he continued, reiterating a claim he had made in 1976 to the League of Arab States: ‘nations in the Middle East and elsewhere that possess large oil and gas reserves … appear to be in the best strategic and economic position to make and sell [petroprotein] in world trade.’

KISR's 1979 symposium thus contemplated the possibility that a combination of resources unique to the Middle East – abundant hydrocarbons and as-yet-undiscovered microbes – might yet realise the gathered scientists’ dream of bringing to market a new, cheap, safe and efficient way to feed livestock and maybe, one day, humans. Scientists in the Biotechnology Department of the Food Resources Division at KISR had taken up this challenge in 1977, as one of a number of initiatives begun during a significant expansion of KISR led by General Director Dr Adnan Shihab-Eldin. Their work continued, without interruption and with significant success in meeting its targets, until 1990.

In the end, neither livestock nor humans in the Middle East ended up on a home-grown petroprotein diet.