The Oil Drum

BP gives production back to 1965, but reserve history only to 1980. EIA International Petroleum Monthly shows production back to 1970 - no reserves.

Simmons sheds a lot of light on this pre-bogus/post-bogus ME reserve change from when Aramco was run by the American oil companies in the 70s to the Saudi nationalized version of the '80s. There was a U.S. Congressional hearing in 1979 as a follow up to their 1974 hearings into overproduction damage to the Saudi fields in dealing with the demand surge of that time. They found that the problems of '74 had gotten worse. They didn't want to publicize these unsettling developments, so they muffled it from "hearings" to " A Staff Report to the Senate Subcommittee". As Simmons noted:

"The staff report did not hide, however, the huge reduction in the outlook for Saudi Arabia's maximum sustainable oil production. Gone were the confident expectations of the early 1970s that Aramco's oil output could rise to 20 or 25 million barrels a day. Gone too was a revised downward estimate that a plateau of 16 million barrels a day could be sustained for years. By late 1978, the realists at Aramco were predicting that even a rate of 12 million barrels a day begun in 1985 would lead to declining production by 2000 to 2005." Twilight in the Desert, p 383 App. C

This was in 1979 that these American Aramco personel were making this bold projection. It was based on 110 billion barrels of realistically producible reserves. And the report stated it wasn't likely that large new reserves would be found, which has been the case per Simmons. I somehow get the feeling they were a little more honest and/or knowledgable than their subsequent Saudi counterparts. The production curve has followed the 1979 projection closely despite the reserves being doubled, tripled, and what not.

Think of it. Hubbert's model had just been proven correct in predicting the U.S. peak when this government investigation spanning '74 and '79 came to the same conclusion as Hubbert on an approaching global oil production peak. So what does our government, whom we hire to look out for our well being, do with this information? Well, they hid it of course. They put it under lock and key lest we might get prepared. Honest to God, that's what they did!

"The notion that Saudi Arabian oil reserves could be produced at 10, 12, or 15 million barrels a day for 50 or more years was utterly dismissed by the subpoenaed papers that formed the basis of this staff report. What a misfortune it was that this report received no media coverage and these key papers were locked away from public view for next 25 years - years during which the entire world grew more and more convinced that Middle East oilfields were so prolific they could be produced at virtually any rate through the first quarter of the twenty-first century."

The supporting documents for this report were deemed "sensitive" and put under seal for another 50 years. Yet another brilliant energy policy coup by our wise men in Washington.