Twilight in the Desert by Matthew R. Simmons

Author:Matthew R. Simmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2010-12-27T16:00:00+00:00

9

The Best of the Rest

The Lower-Production Oilfields

The half-century of miraculous oil production in Saudi Arabia has been anchored by the largest oilfield the world has ever known, Ghawar, supported strongly by three other super-giant fields, Safaniya, Abqaiq, and Berri. In 1979, when Saudi Arabia’s oil output was nearing its all-time peak, these four fields accounted for 8.5 million barrels a day of a 9.8 million barrel sustainable peak output. All three of these sustaining oilfields are well past their production peaks and possibly nearing steep production declines. They might be reinvigorated for some period of time through aggressive drilling and stimulation strategies, but this would be the equivalent of performing a tune-up on a 30-year old Buick: It will make the car run better for a short while, but top speed will be 60 miles per hour instead of 95, and every hard acceleration will take a toll. Only with Ghawar is it unclear whether production has peaked or not. But if Ghawar is still capable of producing more than five million barrels per day, everything said about the field in the technical literature suggests that output at such a rate could not be sustained for very long, and it would damage future productivity.

What, then, of the other fields that have supplemented production from the super-giants over the years? Can they make up for declining production from Saudi Arabia’s Big Four oilfields? The answer would seem to be “no,” but with a minor qualification. The more recently developed Shaybah field may have further upside potential, but it has already shown that it will not replicate Abqaiq or Berri. No other new discoveries are queued up for development.

Instead, Saudi Aramco is investing its capital in projects to revive several fields that have either declined significantly or have been mothballed for some time due to their poor reservoir qualities, deficient performance, or both. The target production rates for these fields are impressive, well beyond the production levels they achieved the first time around. It remains to be seen whether this handful of sows’ ears can be turned into silk purses. The past performance of these fields is not encouraging for future production, as we shall see in this chapter.

So far, Saudi Aramco has been unusually successful in applying leading-edge technology to address problems in its oilfields, and it would seem to be counting on this technology to work new miracles. The newer technologies and production practices are expensive, however, and the barrels of oil that Aramco can extract through multilateral horizontal completions and reservoir-stimulation techniques will cost more than the barrels of free-flowing oil that used to come so easily from open-hole vertical wells in Ghawar and Abqaiq. Further, the fields now targeted for investment and the pockets of remaining oil in the mainstay fields present issues that are far more complex and problematic than almost any of the challenges Aramco faced before the 1990s.

Saudi Arabia’s oil production is balanced at a precarious tipping point. Aramco’s current programs and initiatives may forestall the tipping into decline for a short time.

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