Where Ghawar Goes, The Rest Of OPEC Follows - Oil Drum Australia/New Zealand

[hatrack]

Interesting article!

Oil Reserves in Saudi Arabia

In their 1986 study “Giant Oil and Gas Fields”, Carmalt and St John (American Association of Petroleum Geologists2) published a list of the largest five hundred oil and gas fields known at the time. This included field size estimates for 24 major fields in Saudi Arabia (crude oil and condensate).

In SPE Paper 255803, Saudi Aramco reference this Carmalt and St John paper when they claimed that the Berri field “ranks as the 22nd largest in the world”. While this does not specifically endorse any of the reported field sizes, that Saudi Aramco have seen fit to reference this paper provides it with a significant level of credibility. It is also important to note that Carmalt and St John, using a variety of sources including industry databases, performed their study before the widespread revision of OPEC reserves in the 'quota wars' of the mid/late 1980's. This suggests that the data they were using would have been free from any of the 'political pollution in technical databases' which Jean Laherrere has roundly criticised more recently.

Stuart's analysis1 revises the field size estimate for Ghawar up to 96 billion barrels (Gb). Some of this increase may have occurred in the southern sections of Ghawar, especially Haradh which has only been extensively drilled and developed since 1986. It is significant that, despite this additional development, the total field size estimate has only increased by 17% in two decades. Euan's base case analysis4 revises Abqaiq reserves to 14.8 Gb, which represents a 16% increase on the 1986 estimate.

That the Carmalt and St John estimates are only modestly lower than these two new estimates, is encouraging, but not all that surprising given that most of the listed fields were already 20-40 years old and extensively developed by the time of their study.

While some fields may come in below the 1986 expectations, which is to be expected among a mix of P50 estimates, others may yield yet larger percentage increases. At this stage it is reasonable to extend the observed average increase to the other 22 fields in the list. While this is based on results from only two fields, the sample covers 43% of the resource so it is quite significant. The result is in an additional increase of 21 Gb in the size of the other listed fields (in addition to 14 in Ghawar and 2 in Abqaiq), bringing the revised sub-total to 259 Gb.

The cumulative additional resource in very much smaller fields and those discovered since 1986, of which the Hawtah trend fields are the only known significant oil find, are estimated to amount to 6 billion barrels. This yields a total initial reserves estimate for Saudi Arabia of 265 billion barrels.

Cumulative production of crude oil and condensate to end of 2006 is 113 Gb. Therefore, 43% of initial oil reserves have been produced, with end 2005 reserves of 152 Gb (2P). This is more than 110 billion barrels short of the 264 stated by OPEC and widely reported as Saudi Arabian 'proven' reserves (although 264 includes an amount of NGLs also).

EDIT

http://anz.theoildrum.com/node/4033#more

[cliss]

1. Interesting and thanks

for posting Hatr.

I think the situation with Saudi Arabia is that they do not publicize their oil reserves. They keep it under wraps as much as possible.

However, I've heard the Ghawar oil field is going to start a rapid decline. Maybe it's already started? (Bush went to SA last week, asked for more oil got snubbed).
Also, I believe the Cantarell oil field in Mexico is starting a decline.

Either way, there has to be an explanation for the rapid price hikes.

2 + 2 = ?

[bhikkhu]

2. Analyzing Ghawar activity with google earth is one new thing:

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3954

It is pretty impressive how this is being done...looking at it they still have some big areas of development left, and probably some years of healthy production left. But it is well worth a look at what they must do to keep up production levels, particularly when you hear about requests that the Saudis "open the spigots" to bring prices back down.