The Oil Drum

127 comments on DrumBeat: April 13, 2008

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ace on April 13, 2008 - 7:26pm

I thought that the King's statement about leaving the oil in the ground for the children was very smart. If Saudi oil production later this year is below 9 mbd then the King can simply say "we are saving some oil for our children".

Here is a chart from Zagar's ASPO 2005 presentation which shows some static fields in green which could be saved for the children.

Saudi Arabia Discoveries OIIP - click to enlarge
source
Saudi Arabia Can It Deliver?
Jack Zagar, MHA Petroleum Consultants
ASPO Conference - Lisbon, Portugal, May 19-20, 2005
http://www.cge.uevora.pt/aspo2005/abscom/ASPO2005_Zagar.ppt

The static green fields may be small in size and harder to develop than large fields but could be significant. The 65 static fields contain about 17% of OIIP of about 100 Gb. Assuming a conservative recovery factor of 30% this gives 30 Gb URR in total. The average URR per field would be just over 0.45 Gb.

Assuming that the King's statement is a warning that Saudi's oil production is now in slow decline, or at best on a 9 mbd C&C plateau, then I have no doubt that the world's crude oil and lease condensate production is now in irreversible decline as shown below.

click to enlarge
Please note that the chart above includes Alberta tar sands production but excludes biofuels, natural gas liquids and refinery processing gains.
For more info please see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3623
and http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3665

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JoulesBurn on April 13, 2008 - 9:53pm

One thing that's interesting when looking at the Saudi Discoveries plot is that of all the fields discovered since 1970 or so, they chose to develop the Hawtah fields -- and they have proved to be problematic. And they didn't stumble across them, either. They looked real hard, and then were very excited (and boastful) when they found them. Why develop those, and not the others (especially those which are larger)? The super light API oil? I don't think that they were inspired by JFK^* and did it just "because it was hard". Rather, the others were less attractive for some reason. Go after the easy oil first, and wait for later technology improvements to make getting the harder oil out less costly.

^*from his Moon Speech

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ace on April 14, 2008 - 4:34am

I suppose the Hawtah fields, at the bottom left of the chart below, were the easiest to develop compared to the other discoveries made since about 1970. Many of the other discovered fields in the 1970s appear to be located in the upper left corner of the chart below. These fields might also contain heavier oil and lack infrastructure.