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26 comments on Playing detective with Saudi production numbers

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mcgowanjm on December 16, 2005 - 11:38am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Three items and a BTW:

1) Colin Campbell does not trust BP.

For reserves to stay the same despite production means production has to have been exactly matched by new discoveries or by reserve revision.

2)So I come to the issue of confused dates. An oil field is found when the first borehole is drilled into it. An oilfield contains what it contains, for the simple reason that it was filled in the geological past. Consequently, all the oil ever to be recovered from it, whatever the technology used and whatever the economic conditions, is logically attributable to the first discovery. After all, if we had not been born, we would not have a career of any kind. So I think that the date of a field's discovery is quite as important as the amount of oil or gas it contains...

http://www.feasta.org/documents/wells/contents.html?one/campbell.html

3) On Water Cut-Technology that only hastens the day...

"For example, I'm working a lot with Saudi Aramco. Their problem is that they have four or five fields that are more than 50 years old. Process plant is designed for a water-cut of maybe up to 30%, but they have 70% and 90% water-cut (My Edit-Ghawar maybe?) in some places.
by Jeremy Cresswell
The Press and Journal
North Scotland

Courtesy LATOC

http://www.kenai-peninsula.org/content/view/249/79/

And BTW-how much NatGas does it take to produce a blast that can be seen 100 miles.-The pipeline exploded just before 2 a.m. near the intersection of U.S. 180 and Texas 16, about 12 miles west of Palo Pinto.

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/3529210.html

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ab3 on December 16, 2005 - 1:54pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Well, I doubt that Gilbert trusts what BP says either. He's retired now and can say what he believes, and evidently he believes a lot of the same things that Campbell believes because he's also a member of ASPO-Ireland.

I'm familiar with the issues of anomalous reserves data in OPEC and with high water cuts in Ghawar and other Saudi fields. I think Simmons makes a very compelling argument, but he and HO and Stuart always add the disclaimer that whatever conclusions they draw are based on incomplete data. That is, they could be very wrong.

Gilbert is also a peak oiler and evidently has reached a quite different conclusion about what SA can do. I myself am not in the oil industry and don't have access to the same data (or time to analyze them), so I have to try to wade through what the different parties are saying and make some sense of it all. As I said, I find Simmons's take on SA convincing, but I wonder what's behind Gilbert's claim.

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26 comments on Playing detective with Saudi production numbers

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