Saudi Arabia's Total Reserves: 175 Gb with only 65 Gb Remaining

[Dogmudgeon]

Evidence that SA reserves are about 50% of what they have been represented to be, and that they are significantly past the half-way point.

from The Oil Drum

Saudi Arabia's Reserve "Depletion Rates" provide Strong Evidence to Support Total Reserves of 175 Gb with only 65 Gb Remaining

Summary

In Dr. Saleri’s Saudi Aramco presentation on Feb 24, 2004 to the CSIS in Washington, D.C., he stated that Our typical depletion rate is about two percent. However, Aramco’s definition of annual depletion rate is consistently calculated as annual production as a percentage of total reserves. Aramco’s calculation method will be confirmed by the examples below.

Data from the presentation is used to convert Aramco's depletion rates into conventional depletion rates which show that conventional maximum depletion rates forAin Dar/Shedgum, Abaiq and Berri are well above 5%/yr. In addition, Aramco's stated depletion rate for Shaybah shows that Aramco believes that Shaybah has up to 20 Gb total reserves.

In 2003, assume that Aramco could have produced at an average capacity of 9.5 Mb/day for the entire year. Production reached this level during the Iraq invasion in March 2003. The annual production is 3.5Gb (9.5Mb/d*365d*(1Gb/1000Mb)).

Aramco’s proved reserves are equal to the annual production divided by Aramco’s definition of annual depletion rate. Thus, total reserves are equal to 175Gb (3.5 Gb/2%), which is about half of their stated number of an extremely optimistic 359 Gb.

Finally, assuming that total reserves are 175 Gb and that these reserves are produced at a conventional depletion rate of below 5.5%/year, the oil production rate of Saudi Arabia is forecast to Dec 2020. This forecast shows that production follows an exponential decline curve down to 4.5 million barrels/day in Dec 2020 and that it is highly likely that the world's crude oil and lease condensate production has passed a peak of 74.2 million barrels/day on May 2005.

(There's more ...)

--p!

[merwin]

1. Gigabytes, megabytes...

I didn't know they were able to store oil on hard disk platters!

[Dogmudgeon]

2. I think Gb means "billion barrels"

After all, the official abbreviation for a gigabyte is "GiB".

The Saudis don't store the oil on hard disks ... they only manipulate the numbers there.

--p!

[merwin]

3. Sorry, Gigabit!

I think I get it now... the same manipulation that the Bush admin does with their hard disks. Although, I assume that when Scooter Libby gets to prison, his hard disk will turn into a floppy drive.

[Dogmudgeon]

4. Kicking for its importance

I am surprised that this story has gotten so little attention -- it's a smoking-gun situation. The Saudis are swearing on a stack of Korans that they have 369 billion barrels' total with about 240 billion left to go. The petrologic evidence says otherwise.

Although most of us hard-core Peaknik wonks have read it at The Oil Drum, I think it deserves a wider audience.

--p!