Khebab this is my point we are basically entirely dependent on technology.
And its a race between faster depletion rates and greater recovery.

How can we know that they will get a 60% recovery. The field is high quality but it has super K zones bypassed oil pockets etc. And furthermore we are really dependent on getting this extra 20% or a large portion of it at high flow rates.

In general the rate of production over the last several years and esp the coming ones will be very dependent on what we really have accomplished with advanced technology.

I'm very skeptical of the concept that we have both increased URR and gained the ability to get most of this extra oil out at high flow rates.

Basically todays production can be classified in three classes.

1.) New large fields ( small percentage of worlds oil )
2.) In field small field thin layer extraction mainly horizontal or smart completion on verticals.
3.) High water 90% cut what I call rock washing.

Ghawar is at the thin layer extraction phase. All my reading indicates this approach allows you to get the last of the oil out at low water cut and high flow rates for a short period of time.
Outside of tight formations not easily produced using verticals I've seen no evidence that recovery factors are higher.

Now for 3 you have two problems one the amount of oil you pushed out with water drive originally is dependent on the fractional flow of the formation along with physical cracking etc.
Ghawar may or may not have had higher recovery rates from the original water drive. I've not seen enough evidence to convince me either way on this.

Next for Ghawar the shear size of the the field makes moving to rock washing at high water cut a huge engineering project which the Saudis are not doing yet in all other fields a lot of the real URR increases are obtained at much lower production rates during this phase of the operation.
And I don't think they will unless oil remains in high demand for a long time. They are better off producing the other fields and coming back to the rock washing problem for Ghawar later.

What KSA is claiming is that the production mode of Ghawar magically moved almost 90% of the OIP.
One reason they are not in a hurry to wash rocks they don't believe they left a lot behind.

I don't buy it.

But thanks for your response I'm troubled that our future rests on our technical achievements which at least from my reading are subject to extravagant claims that don't match reality.
A lot of the work done on the oil drum really points out that the claims made by the oil industry are dubious at best. I've come to the conclusion that we have yet to fully determine how far off they really are. From what I can tell the current approaches are still giving numbers that can be up to 50% too high.

M King. Hubbert correctly predicted the peak of production for the US. He also predicted peak production for the world and a total URR of 1250 GB. Above ground factors around the peak year that Hubbert predicted of 1995 easily explain why we did not see peak production. The simplest is we hit peak production capacity but the world could not use all the oil. If you go back and try to figure production capacity around 1995 and remove the effects of preceding events like the Iran/Iraq war its obvious that the world could have hit close to 90-100mbd back in 1995.
No way in hell could we do that now.

But given technology and political factors our current high production even if the URR is around 1250 barrels is not unjustified. I'm 100% convinced that we are now able to produce a lot of the original URR estimates at high flow rates with current technology.

What I've not been able to convince myself of is that M K. Hubberts estimate for world URR is wrong. Ghawar points to the problem with even on field predictions of future production from about now on out are completely dependent on how much we have increased URR available at high flow rates.