>>We need to seize the House of Saud by the throat and force them to pump more.<<
Saudis Face Hurdle In New Oil Drilling
Big, Complex Field Seems to Mark End Of Easy Pickings
By NEIL KING JR.
April 22, 2008
Next year, if all goes well, Saudi Arabia will turn the spigots on the largest oil field to come online anywhere in the world since the late 1970s.
The Khurais complex, sprawling across a swath of red dunes and rocky plains half the size of Connecticut, is expected to add 1.2 million barrels a day to an oil market caught between growing demand and a paucity of significant new discoveries. The twin forces have led to historically high prices for crude oil, which settled at a record $117.48 on Monday.
But the project also illustrates a darker point: Even in Saudi Arabia, home to more than a quarter of the world's known recoverable reserves, the age of cheap and easily pumped oil is over.
To tap Khurais, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco, has embarked on the most complex earth- and water-moving project in its history. It is spending up to $15 billion on a vast network of pipes, oil-treatment facilities, deep horizontal wells and water-injection systems that it calls "one of the largest industrial projects being executed in the world today."
Moreover, with the project, Aramco is dipping into one of its last big basins of oil. After Khurais, Saudi Arabia will have only one known mega-field left to fully develop, the even more challenging Manifa field, offshore in the Persian Gulf. Much of the kingdom's reserves beyond these lie either in aging fields or smaller pockets.
"Khurais and Manifa are the last two giants in Saudi Arabia," says Sadad al-Husseini, a former Aramco vice president for oil exploration. "Sure, we will discover dozens of other smaller fields, but after these, we are chasing after smaller and smaller fish."
Full text: Message 24520697
Original: online.wsj.com |
