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26 comments on Debating to the numbers (or more on Saudi production)

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Stuart Staniford on September 29, 2005 - 1:12am Permalink | Subthread | Comments top
Thanks HO. Your link didn't work, but Laherrere's discussion is here. He believes IHS is overstating reserves as it is "obvious that scout companies want to please the OPEC countries as the future important clients", and he details what IHS did to match what the Saudi's are now claiming. Most interesting to me is this picture:

For those of you unfamiliar, I explained this kind of graph here.. It will be interesting to see if the Saudi's can raise themselves off that straight line to 180gb. A 180gb URR with the last pre-Saudi Aramco OOIP of 530gb would be a recovery factor of 34%. Looks a lot more realistic to me than believing with Mr al-Naimi that URR is going to go to 570gb (or even 370gb with the existing proven reserves).

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Khebab on September 29, 2005 - 1:57pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I added al-Naimi claim (12.9 mbpd in 2009) with a linear ramp-up between 2005 and 2009, the logistic line (in red) based on the new points leads to an URR around 570 Gb.

picture here

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Stuart Staniford on September 30, 2005 - 5:03am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Nice observation!
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Murray on September 30, 2005 - 11:52am Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Congressional testimony 1979 - proven plus probable = 177.5 Gb. That is ominously close to the above x intercept. I hadn't seen this Laherrere curve before, but to me it is very scary, especially when linked to the 1979 testimony. If a reasonable URR for SA is 180 Gb they are already at 58%. As I noted before, max. reservoir contact wells are likely to move the point of decline closer to 70% (not to be confused with 70% of URR recoverable) than 50%. At an assumed 180 Gb URR, a current production rate of 9.5 Gb/d and 70% peak point they are at best 6 years from decline, and probably very close to their peak production now.  Murray
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Murray on September 30, 2005 - 12:03pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
I should have added that when water gets to those MRC wells, SA won't decline gradually, they will drop like a stone.  Murray
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Khebab on September 30, 2005 - 12:35pm Permalink | Subthread | Parent | Comments top
Exactly! if you look at the value for k= 7% (take the aP/Q value corresponding to the logistic line at Q=0), it gives you the maximum production rate at peak for a logistic curve:
Pmax= 180Gb x k / 4= 3.15 Gb/year= 8.63 mbpd

so if this model is true, they are probably past peak right now and they will have a high depletion rate. Conversely, you can take their current production figure around 11 mbpd and compute the corresponding URR which gives 229 Gb.
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