241 comments on Depletion Levels in Ghawar
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241 comments on Depletion Levels in Ghawar
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Leanan,
This is wonderful work and it is confirmed by the work done by M.K.Horn and Associates on their work on the Giant Oil Fileds of the World. As I have posted on previous occasions, they put Ghawar with a URR of 97108 MMBOE.
In 2004 they reported 79332 MMBOE depleted with 17776 MMBOE remaining which ties in with what Stuart is saying. With production since that puts Ghawar at about 86% depleted with approx. 13 MMBOE left and that would include gas.
See AAPG paper 10068 Figure 9
http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/2004/horn/index.htm
18gb left in 2004 for the whole field seems very pessimistic. One would have to assume pretty poor recoveries in the south to get that low, and although there's not that much data that's come to light, what data there is does not suggest grounds for that degree of pessimism.
Well Stuart,
All I can say is those figures are coming from people who are continually upgrading their work on the 910 or so giant oil fields and building on the work of Halbouty, Carmel, St John, Beydoun, Nehring and other highly distinguished geologists as well as the base of Petro Consultants
They also state that the whole Arabian Plate held 900 MMBOE. Beydoun states that 302 MMBO had been produced by 1997. When you take gas out of it and subsequent production, the whole Middle East may have less than we think
Without knowing technical details of how they produced their estimate, there's not much more I can say.
http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl
hit it if you are so inclined...search for Ghawar.
No stories were found that match your query.
Its still on page 1, between the two most recently posted stories. Set the filter colour to cyan to reject most of the junk.
[update between "Science: A detailed plan" and "Linux: The clueless newbie"]
Go over to dKos and recommend Jerome's diary on Stuart's post for front paging.
Downunder - my Base Case had 97 billion initial reserves - so excellent agreement with Horn Associates. But by end 2006 I still have 27 billion left, i.e. 72% depleted. And so like Stuart, I'm scepticle that the depletion level is so severe in 2004. It's hard to see where 79 billion bbls might have come from.
I reckon that Abqaiq may have produced 13 billion. So if 79 billion is right then we have 92 billion from the Arab D - leaving only 20 billion produced from everywhere else (C+C+NGL for a 2004 total of 112 billion). Does that mean other fields are hardly depleted at all?
Euan,
Remember those 79 billion are not all oil, but include gas. When Horn and his associates mention 79332 billion at the beginning of 2004 they are being quite specific. I think the big oil companies know exactly how much oil there was and is in all the big middle east fields, after all BP has been there for nearly 100 years and Chevron over 80.
If you read the link that Stuart used by Martin Ziegler, the Exxon geologist, he explains the whole geology of the Arabian Plate. They know where all the fields are and where they're not. I am currently trying to piece together what was in all the 151 big oil fields in the Arabian Plate and it doesn't seem that there was more than 500 MMBOE in the lot, the rest being gas, which would put Saudi Arabia at about 170 billion URR with 60 left which is what ACE has been saying.
I will talk to you by email about my further thoughts on this.