And Saudi Arabia had an answer . . .
Posted by Heading Out on February 9, 2006 - 12:33am
Topic: Supply/Production
Tags: florida, haradh, lng, mrc, repsol, saudi arabia, smart wells, spain [list all tags]
The company didn't say what the current output level is, but has said output is expected to be 300,000 b/d of crude oil and 140 million cubic feet per day of natural gas in the second quarter.Saudi Aramco said oil began flowing Wednesday through a gas/oil separation plant at the southern end of Ghawar, the world's biggest oil field, just 21 months after approval of funding and ahead of schedule.
In the statement, Saudi Aramco said 520,000 b/d of treated seawater will be injected into the field each day to maintain reservoir pressure.
Saudi Oil Minister Ali Naimi said in January that with the addition of Haradh, output capacity would be 11.3 million b/d in April.. It is important, I think, to note the use of the word "capacity" in that statement. Further, in light of Matt Simmons critique of the field in "Twilight in the Desert," it will be of further interest to see how production holds up, over the years.
At the same time, much closer to home, a battle is apparently brewing in the Senate over drilling off the Florida coast. In that regard we are still apparently in NIMBY land. Time will tell.
There was an interesting, albeit not enlightening, paragraph today in the Moscow Times about President Putin's visit to Spain.
Spanish Industry Minister Jose Luis Montilla confirmed that energy giant Gazprom and Spanish-Argentine oil and energy company Repsol YPF were in talks to collaborate on a liquefied natural gas project. He did not provide further details.It may be remembered that it was only recently that Repsol announced that they were cutting their estimates of current reserves by 25%.Spanish media reported in October that Repsol and Gazprom met to discuss business opportunities to supply Russian gas to Spain and possible cooperation in supplying liquefied gas to the United States and other countries.
As a footnote, yesterday I meant to cite an earlier post on Iran and their anticipated shortfall, it was posted back in May.
Future Capacity - 12.0 million b/day
Future Reserve Capacity - 1.5 to 2 million b/day
Current Production - About 10.5 nillion b/day
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Beach Boy on Wed Feb 08 at 8:02 AM CST Comments top
"it will be interesting to see what the Saudi's do in regard to increasing production to maintain overall OPEC numbers."
We know at least what they say they will do:
From http://www.platts.com/Oil/highlights/2006/oilp_neft_012506.xml
Saudi Arabia will increase crude oil production capacity to 12.5-mil b/d by the end of the decade but meeting future oil demand will be a challenge for the world's producers because OECD production has declined and growth in the former Soviet Union has slowed, a Saudi oil official said on Jan 25. Ahmed A Al-Subaey, general manager of Saudi Petroleum Ltd in Tokyo, Saudi Aramco's Japanese arm, said some of the additional capacity would offset natural decline, while the rest would allow the company to expand maximum sustained capability from 10.5-mil b/d to 12-mil b/d, he told an international industry symposium organized by the Japan Cooperation Center, Petroleum.
"These capacity levels provide us with a cushion of 1.5- to 2-mil b/d spare production capacity, in keeping with Saudi Arabia's commitment to enhance market stability," Subaey said. Saudi Aramco also had an "aggressive exploration program" to expand the kingdom's current crude reserve base of 260-bil bbl, roughly a quarter of the world's proven reserves, Subaey said. He did not give target figures.
Saudi oil minister Ali Naimi has said that further exploration could add another 200-bil to reserves. But in spite of this, meeting future demand will still be a challenge with demand for OPEC oil expected to increase over time because of declines in other producing areas. OPEC's 11 members currently account for roughly 40% of global oil production of some 85-mil b/d. Subaey referred to declines in production from Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development member states, which include leading producers the US, Norway and the UK. He said that once strong growth in the former Soviet Union had slowed due to lack of infrastructure and depletion of existing giant fields.
Call on OPEC oil set to increase
"As a result, the world must look beyond many of the traditional OECD suppliers for the new production needed to meet rising demand, and the call on OPEC production will increase over time," Subaey said. "Maintaining that kind of capacity in reserve isn't cheap, but it does provide a critical safeguard in times of market turmoil or disruptions in supply from other sources, and its value in keeping markets steady has been demonstrated repeatedly over recent years," the Saudi executive said of the kingdom's capacity expansion plans. Global demand in petroleum was growing in "two vastly different sectors," he said. One was the developed economies, where growth in consumption was forecast to be moderate, but which had a substantial base of established demand that must continue to be met. The other category was developing economies like China and India, as well as countries in southeast Asia, which were starting from a relatively small base of demand but where petroleum consumption was set for "strong, rapid and sustained growth" as their economies grow.
At the same time, Subaey said that upstream capacity expansions were "of limited benefit" without corresponding midstream and downstream investments. And it was not just a matter of boosting downstream capacity, but also transforming refinery configurations, to overcome the current "mismatch" between global oil supplies -- which would continue moving towards heavier and sour crudes -- and refineries geared to run lighter, sweet oil. Saudi Aramco, in addition to capacity expansions at several of its refineries, is developing two new export-oriented grassroots refineries, one on the Kingdom's west coast and the other on the eastern seaboard, Subaey said.
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AlanfromBigEasy on Wed Feb 08 at 11:18 AM CST Comments top
Several items of note in this Saudi statement.
A half million barrels of new capacity are going to offset Saudi decline (12.5 vs. 12 million b/day). So Saudi acknowledges decline at home (a first I think).
The Saudis think production will fall from traditional non-OPEC producers
Their extra capacity will not be routinely produced, but held in reserve to stabilize the markets. (Why knock the price down ?) Also "Look elsewhere for new supplies, not from us".
They implicitly acknowledge that we are past Peak Oil for light, sweet crude (2000/2001 were flat, now down about 2 million b/day)
Chris
of the field, it will take some time for the
water to migrate to the wells. I have a son
who works for Aramco. He says the water cut
for the first oil coming out of Haradh is
running about 4%. He said the engineers seemed
to be quite happy with that.
But can someone answer the second half of my question? Why are they putting in more water volume than the volume of oil they're extracting?
Chris
There are several possible reasons, but the most likely is what is known as Oil Formation Volume Factor (FVF for short, mathematical symbol capital B subscript little O). Basically, oil takes up more space in the reservoir than it does on the surface. The main reason for this is that oil in the reservoir contains large amounts of dissolved gas - possibly 1000 or 2000 cubic feet of gas per barrel of oil (say up to 300 cubic metres of gas per cubic metre of oil).
The gas molecules are small and fit in between the oil molecules, but oil with gas in solution is less dense and the oil simply takes up more space. Add to that the fact that the oil is up to 100 degrees Kelvin hotter at depth, so bigger, and then take off a little volume to allow for the high pressure downstairs, and you end up with Bo = 1.4; so for every barrel of oil you produce at surface you need to inject 1.4 barrels to replace what you are taking out.
1.4 is a very typical oil FVF - it can vary from 1.15 or so up to maybe 1.6 or 1.7, depending on a number of factors, principally the quantity of dissolved gas.
It is good reservoir management practice to inject one barrel of something for every barrel you produce. Here Aramco are producing oil, so they are balancing reservoir-conditions production by injecting 40% more water than they are producing oil at surface. I don't know what they are doing with the gas - they may be injecting it as well, in which case they are either over-injecting (and increasing reservoir pressure), or maybe compensating for an FVF of more than the 1.4 I mentioned.
When water starts to come through, the rate of water injection may be required to balance oil PLUS water production, so injection may have to increase further. Some of that extra 40% might be replacing that smll amount of water that they're getting already.
I don't know much about the history of Ghawar, so I don't know whether Haradh is far enough below initial pressure to need repressuring. So maybe they're overinjecting deliberately. Or maybe they've sized the WI plant extra big just in case of early water production, and they're taking advantage of it to overinject. With something that size you'd have to overinject like crazy before you did any harm.
4% is an acceptable inital watercut for an infill well, which this isn't, really. Probably means the water isn't quite where they thought it was. IIRC Ghawar is mainly reservoired in the Arab D Limestone, so a bit of water might easily cause scaling. It will be interesting to see if those expensive branched wells really make any difference to oil recovery in the long run.
Chris
Thanks for this little gem of news from your son.
I, for one, would be very interested in any news you can bring us from your son in the future.
can he (without risking his employment) give us any more inside news about Aramco and it's oil production?
or in production of oil in any way. He is in
training, or more correctly testing, of Saudi
operators and electronic maintenance. He
primarily in the northern part of the country
but he often gets sent to other fields to
qualify operators. He is part of the
"Saudiaziation of Aramco" that they have been
trying to do for the last 25 years. As you
probably know Saudi hopes to replace all
Western workers with Saudis. But my son seems
to think this will be impossible because of
Wasta. He says people never get promoted
because of their ability to perform but Wasta
rules everything. Those who get promoted have
Wasta and they get promoted even if they cannot
do squat. Those who do not have Wasta never get
anywhere regardless of how qualified they are.
http://www.freenewmexican.com/news/10507.html
I had to work with him to get him even
interestedin peak oil. But I gave him my copy
of "Twilight in the Desert" and now he asks
questions everywhere he goes. (He said when he
finished the book that seven other people were
already in line to read it.) At any rate the
next time he posts me anything concerning Saudi
oil I will post it.
Well this certainly counters the argument that ANWR will take 10 years to set-up shop and pump oil. Although ANWR is out in the middle of BFE (hey add it to the acro list) and may take a little longer than 21 months, 10 years is downright propaganda.
Doesn't sound like ANY of this preliminary work has been accomplished at ANWR -- let alone the building of roads, pipelines, and whatever other infrastructure needed up there. Bottom line: I'm not qualified to say how many years it will take to get oil flowing to market from ANWR, but I'll bet it's significantly more time than 21 months. What say you, HO?
Lots of work.
A full scale development plan must consider the optimum well completion rate, the expected optimum gas/oil flow per well, the optimum total flow from the field over the fields expected lifetime, when enough production will be available to justify beginning some temporary transportation operations out of the area, when enough production will be available to fill an economicly viable liquid pipeline, same for a gas pipeline. What the optimum pipeline economic diameters should be, given the many possible production rates from the beginning to the end of a field's lifetime and the pipeline ROI. I.E. it would not be practical to get 100 rigs up there and drill all the wells in 1 year, then flow at both maximum gas and oil production rates for 2 years while using very large diameter pipelines and high pump/compression power installations, and then flow at 10% pipeline capactiy for the remainder of the field's life. Optimum rates for net oil produced from a field can vary significantly over the field's lifetime, especially when it is far from the market and the transportation infrastructure is nonexistant. If this field was closer to market and 100% development did not include gas or depend on building the Alaska Gas Pipeline, it could undoubtedly provide a good oil only stream rate within 3-6 years.
I've talking with other people and it seems that the complete process of Uranium Enrichment is only made in two other countries: US and France.
Being that the case, Chirac's declarations and his completely new position as opposed to that taken towards Iraq makes much more sense. Iran could become a menace to their monopoly.
Many other countries have uranium enrichment facilities, including Argentina and (soon) Brazil.
Of those countries mentioned I think only Russia might have it. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Can somebody with real knowledge on this subject please comment.
Are not the engineering issues involved with synchronized timing of shaped charges the real problem?
Two clues. One is James Risen's new book on the CIA. State of War. See one of the final chapters on the bungled Iran/Russian scientist caper.
The other is a fascinating reference. See Nathan Hodges' reports on Iraq from Iraq in Slate. Tuesday's "dispatch" has a link to shaped charges on global security.org. Apparently shaped charges are not fully understood. Discussion of the topic makes it sound like string theory. Now you have to develop a mechanism that will time many of these explosions precisely.
How "easy" is this?
Also, can anyone comment on what type of bombs India and Pakistan have? Are these Hiroshima-fission type-"atom bombs." Or of the Hydrogen-Fusion-what we really need to worry about-variety?
It is easier to make crude nuclear wepons out of high grade uranium then plutonium but you must have an enrichment plant to get the uranium. You do not need any shaped charges for such a weapon.
It is easier to make large quantities of plutonium then large quantities of uranium since chemical separation of plutonium from other substances is far easier then isotopical separation of U-235 from U-238.
To make plutonium out of U-238 you need a nuclear reactor and it can be run on unenriched uranium if it is designed to be economical with its neutrons and moderated with etiher heavy water or ultra pure graphite.
This is the usual choise made by countries building nucluar wepons.
You also want to swap out the plutonium laden fuel often so you do not get much of the heavier plutonium isotopes that due to their radioactivity makes your plutonium harder to handle and also destabilizes your bomb so you do not know if it will go BOOM or pfft. Military planners hate unreliable weapons, terrorists are probably not as picky.
If the bombs then must be small, light, very reliable or boosted into hydrogen bombs there is need for far more reserach and development of tricky components.
www.fas.org use to be a good resource for more information:
http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction=325&projectId=7
Weapon grade uranium is uncomparatively harder to produce and requires much better and larger equipment than for nuclear fuel. Clearly if they were making materials for nukes we'd know it because it is very hard to hide.
People who know cannot tell. People who tell generally do not know.
Possibly we have moved on from the first generation (cigarette burn on tritium) and second generation (gamma optics implosion of lithium deuteride) to third generation (not seen in open literature) designs. We may use some tritium in the intiators.
Making tritium is trivial. Just put some lithium in a nuclear reactor. Lithium alloy, because if you use lithium oxide the tritium will diffuse out quickly.
More seriously, producing enough tritium for a tritium boost stage (a few grams?) is undoubtedly difficult in detail. After all, uranium enrichment and plutonium breeding can be described in similarly simple terms.
Commercial tritium applications use relatively little - a typical 'EXIT' sign might contain 6 Ci or about 600 micrograms. Perhaps a neutron source trigger could be made using repurposed commercial tritium, but obtaining multi-gram quantities... not easy even to steal that much, probably.
In general I agree that it's governments that seriously try to build nukes. Terrorist plans should be simpler, preferably co-opting existing features/systems/facilities.
I think most groups of coordinated and intelligent people find productive and civilized ways to work for their agendas.
I think people will have to switch off part of their common sense to become dangerous terrorists. This is what scares me about religion, any religion. Its scary when people start to believe very hard and follow an authorative leader and thus turn themselves into tools for random parts of some old scripture or one individuals fantasies.
Since then, we've had Dr. Khan selling much more advanced designs all over the world. But you don't need much sophistication to do permanent nuclear damage. A dirty bomb made from few spent fuel rods and a truck of fertilizer could make a large area uninhabitable quite easily.
So, if anybody can get the materials, and anybody can get the knowledge, we just have to trust in good manners.
So yeah, it would make a mess. No, it wouldn't be the "keep away for 50,000 years" problem some claim it is. The immediate explosion would be much more dangerous than the fragments, and radiation detectors on roads would make it impossible to transport unnoticed.
One is material. One is the engineering.
See again James Risen's account.
Magnus, I haven't followed your link yet. I am about to do that. But please, how do you create a nuclear explosion without either a shaped-charge or high-velocity "gun" approach?
I specifically am not talking about terrorists, dirty bombs, or anything related. My question pertains to the ability to country's ability to manufacture a high-quality product. Iran can't make cars. Technologically, their only peer in the nuclear-club is Pakistan, and that might even be a stretch.
While I by no means think terrorists or dirty bombs are a not a threat, I believe the real nuclear threat and hence what countries need to achieve militarily to have "teeth," so to speak, is an arsenal of hundreds of reliable bombs.
Absolutely. Crude engineering can work with pure fissile materials. Advanced engineering with neutron injection at exactly the right moment and fusion boosting can make less pure fissile materials work.
Thus it is very good that large quantities of very pure U-235 from Russia is being blended down and used as reactor fuel. If nuclear armed countries with advanced nuclear weapons engineering refrain from using the best materials and destroys them by using them as fuel there is less risk that a theft of materials results in terrorist bomb.
> Magnus, I haven't followed your link yet. I am about to do that. But please, how do you create a nuclear explosion without either a shaped-charge or high-velocity "gun" approach?
As far as I know you dont. But it is easy to build a high velocity gun and it only need one detonator. There seem to be designs of shaped charges that only need two detonators, but I am no expert and cant judge them and neither do I want to become a nuclear weapons expert.
I mostly see nuclear weapons as a threath and a PR problem for nuclear power. Now when the genie is out of the bottle since manny decades I am happy that the most well armed country is democratic. I realy like having USA, GB and France as friends.
Wow. I thought everybody hated us. Now all I can think of is Slim Pickens as Major T.J.'King'Kong leading his B-52 crew onto the target in Dr. Strangelove with 'When Johnny Comes Marching Home' playing at top volume.
In addition to the Federation of American Scientists link given above, I recommend The Nuclear Weapon Archive. The NWFAQ is well worth reading.