My guess from his thinking is that Aramco is facing a real problem in terms of GOSP and real production in the near to middle term, not necessarily in lost production over time. Though that too, in a quantifiable manner, as with any trade-off.

The permutations possible to achieve a high rate of production within a defined band of water/oil and essentially fixed number of wells are steadily shrinking, if the assumption that the Saudis have been successful at mixing oil and water, so to speak, is true.

I'm pretty convinced at this point, especially after wondering at the time about the last Saudi oil surge - storage tanks didn't really make that much sense (my best guess involved tanker routing/filling), especially how it flowed and ebbed so quickly. This appears a satisfying explanation, without any additional infrastructure or conspiracies - merely a careful selection of which wells flow. Easy, possible to weigh in terms of cost/benefit (economic and political), and simple to keep quiet. And easily possible to operate in a short time frame, with lead times of days or weeks, not months or years.

This feels right, and has some fascinating implications in terms of modelling - it should be possible to actually construct testable scenarios from these insights and data.

These last few days have been as fascinating in its way as watching groklaw in its heyday, applying the open source model to the legal process for the benefit of anyone who wrote GPL'd software.

But the oil/water around the wells your not producing is not static.

Lets say you have three wells in a region under water flood.
You produce one of the wells the best one all the time.
The water your flooding with has to go somewhere so it going into displacing the oil around this well.

Lest say the second one your producing as you say if you produce it quickly enough it does exactly what your saying the resting allows the system to come to equilibrium and you get more oil.

Now the third well lets say it has some sort of surface technical problem but had good flow rates before you shut it in. After a few months you come back to produce it and everyones happy and suddenly it crashes. Why ?

Well you produced a lot of oil in the region and so water has moved into and around this well its now not connected to the region and is a bypassed pool of oil surrounded by water since the water flows better than the oil if you produce and drop the pressure you get mainly water not oil. This is the fractional flow problem. Resting wells only works within a limited range under water drive or your getting tons of bypassed oil.

Look at it this way lets say you did something crazy and started just pumping water into the field and only pumping out from the water layer the water is not going to stay under the oil it will flow through any and all cracks it can find creating pockets of bypassed oil.

Think of a sponge half soaked with oil in a closed container with water forced in from the bottom the water will flow through the whole sponge taking the path of least resistance. If you don't relieve the pressure by displacing the oil the water will find the path of least resistance and you end up getting only water channeling through the oil layer.

I think the grand strategy is to actually give up to some extent on this issue and come back and use electric pumps to extract this oil once the water drive is turned off then you don't have the water channeling problems.

No problem but the rate of production is much lower.

With respect, I can't see it. I found a preview page of a paper examining process performance of Saudi GOSPs. It stated that what came out of the wells was a tight water-oil emulsion (30% water original design), stable enough that demulsification was required in the first separation step. If we're talking any kind of an emulsion in the well when they close it off, gravity is going to take centuries instead of months to separate the two phases.