The discovery of oil and natural gas had profound impact in the Gulf countries. Since their discovery, oil and natural gas have become the main pillars of the Gulf economies and its contribution to the export earnings and the government revenues climbed over 80% levels on average in these countries. Therefore, even though the oil reserves boosted their revenues significantly, an economy depending mainly on the oil and natural gas reserves caused various concerns and led these countries to look for alternative sources of revenue. In this framework, one of the industries, which were given priority in order to diversify the existing economic structure, was the aluminum industry. The GCC countries made use of their comparative advantages in energy reserves and geography and began to establish aluminum plants in 1968. The first plant was built by Bahrain as a joint venture in 1968 and started the production in 1971. Today, all the GCC countries have established aluminum industry and except Kuwait, all the other GCC countries have plants which can produce aluminum from the aluminum raw material, alumina. After 30 years from the establishment of the first aluminum plant, we can see that, the GCC countries have made a remarkable progress. From their non-existent aluminum industry, they rose to the level of being an important region for the aluminum production in the world. However, the current situation of the industry show that it has not fully developed yet. Therefore, the findings of this thesis confirm that even though the aluminum industry became a global player in the world aluminum industry and began to make important contributions to the domestic economies in terms of revenue and employment, it is still difficult to break the overdependence on oil and natural gas.