 | GHAWAR: an estimate of remaining oil reserves and production decline (Part 1 - background and methodology) | The Oil Drum: Europe | Russian gas and European energy security |  |
170 comments on GHAWAR: an estimate of remaining oil reserves and production decline (Part 2 - results)
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
Blogroll
- ASPO The official site of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas.
- Energy Bulletin Clearing house for news regarding the peak in global energy supply.
- PowerSwitch Dedicated to raising awareness & discussion of the impending & permanent decline of cheap oil & gas supply.
- ODAC Oil Depletion Analysis Centre working to raise awareness and promote better understanding of the world's oil-depletion problem.
- Global Public Media Public service broadcasting for a post carbon world.
- Post Carbon Institute Learning to live in a low energy world.
- PeakOil.com US site and forum to educate and promote awareness of global hydrocarbon depletion.
- FEASTA The Foundation for the Economics of Sustainability
- Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) This website describes an effective and fair response both to climate change and oil/gas depletion
Other Blogs
User login
Personnel
Editors
Contributors
Peak Oil Primers
Archives
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- February 2007
- January 2007
- December 2006
- November 2006
- October 2006
- September 2006
- August 2006
- July 2006
- June 2006
- May 2006
- April 2006
- March 2006
Vital Trivia
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Euan,
Congrats on a great piece of work, way beyond my ability. I share your excitement (trepidation) about Stuart's results.
I think many in the TOD sphere might consider your results to be "cornucopian" relative to recent discussions. Premptively, I would suggest that they compare your base and high case scenarios to what we are told by Aramco, namely that they can plateau production for another 30 years without a problem.... Even your best case gives us only 6 years before Ghawar starts to decline very quickly. Given the import of Ghawar in the macro scheme of oil production, this should be very worrying to any observer or forecaster.
I looked around the internet for information about Hawiyah a few days ago and could only find information relating to production of NG and NGLs. See this link http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2456/179010. NGL production looks set to increase to about 480 kbpd by the end of the year and NG production to 5.20 BCF/day. I assume that the NGLs are not included in your Hawiyah output forecast since they are not crude oil.
Unless I have my decimals in the wrong place, 5.20 BCF/day is equivalent to just under 900 kboepd. With the additional 480 kbpd of condensates, Hawiyah will be producing about 1.4 million bpd of oil equivalent by the end of 2007.
Were you aware of this production at Hawiyah and, if not, how would it affect your forecasts for up to three 300 kbpd GOSPs and 900 kbpd oil production in the future?
Addendum Edit: Wouldn't this volume of NG production also suggest the presence of a large gas cap in the most elevated part of the Ghawar structure, the Hawiyah / Haradh crest? If this is the case, it must necessarily impact on oil production potential there, simply by reducing the volume of oil reserves . Furthermore, by producing NG and condensate, would it not have the effect of reducing reservoir pressure substantially, thus making any oil recovery in the Hawiyah part of the field a lot more difficult?
I am coming to a layman's conclusion that Aramco has decided that NG and condensates will be what is produced from Hawiyah, and that whatever oil is produced will come a lot later and in much smaller volumes than the 600 - 900 kbpd suggested by Euan in his conclusions.
Bunyonhead - I wasn't aware of the "Hawiyah" gas and NGL production described in this link you provided:
http://www.hydrocarbons-technology.com/projects/saudi-aramco/
This gas is probably produced from the deeper / older Khuff Formation (Permian age) with prognosis for 300,000 bpd NGL production. This will not affect my prognosis for Arab D oil production - but it sure will assist the Saudis offset some declines in crude oil production else where in Ghawar.
THE PERMIAN KHUFF STRUCTURE OF GHAWAR
http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/2004/afifi01/index.htm
Thanks Euan. So we can add a further 300 kbpd to the Total Liquids from Saudi by the end of 2007.
Three supplemntal questions:
- Is it right to say that the Ghawar oil fields sit "on top" of the Khuff structure you have shown above?
- What is KSA doing with all this NG production?
- Why have we heard nothing about plans for Hawiyah Megprojects?
If we need these as soon as you think, then I am surprised that I cannot google any information at all about plans for Hawiyah GOSPs....
Sorry bunyonhead, I don’t have the source but I read a long time ago that NG in Saudi is mostly spent in water desalinization. They don’t have any other source of water than the sea…
It is shocking to see in the CIA World Factbook that the Saudi NG production of 65.68 billion cu m (2004 est.) equals their domestic consumption!
Actually Saudi Arabia has two huge aquifers underlying much of the country. In fact they have been farming wheat there and watering it with aquifer water.
There are many oasis in the country where the aquifers reach the surface. Date palms surround the oasis.
However all the aquifer water is not potable but much of it is. They do have desal plants all along the coast and pipe water all the way to Riyadh from desal plants near Ras Tanura. When I was there in the early 80s, I saw the completion of a huge desal plant just north of Ras Tanura. The pipelines were the largest I have ever seen lain overland.
Since I was there another, even larger, desal plant has been built very near that one.
Saudi also uses natural gas to generate electrical power. Gazlan power plant, near Ras Tanura was a hydro (boiler) plant that burned natural gas but could also burn crude oil or naphtha. Of course the desal plants can also burn crude or naphtha but mostly they burn natural gas.
Ron Patterson
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0016-7398%28199207%29158%3A2%3C215%3ADG...
We know from Voelker's thesis that Hawiyah has been on production since the mid 70s. Some wells, but not all, were rested during the period of low demand in the early eighties. We also know (from Croft tables, and from the relative perm graphs in the "50 years of wettability" paper) that the rock properties are much worse, so both rates of production and ultimate recovery will be lower, especially the former. I think Euan and I broadly agree that South Ghawar has a lot of oil left, and will produce for a long time, but is unlikely to substitute for the North Ghawar production that is being/will be lost.
Stuart, I have been trying to understand the grpah from the "50 years of wettability" paper.
I don't understand the implications of the relative permeability changes when Sw>50%. Does the water co-mingle with the oil or simply leave it behind as it rises to the crest?
Either way, the suggestion is that waterflood is not a good technology to increase production rates.
Is it possible therefore that Aramco is going to reinject the 5.20 bcf/day of dry gas from the Khuff into the Hawiyah Arab-D Formation in an effort to enhance oil recovery?
It might be worth clarifying what that import is.
Euan estimated Ghawar's production as 5mb/d, which is a pretty standard estimate. World oil production was about 85mb/d last year (IEA OMR), meaning Ghawar alone was about 6% of world production. So if Ghawar is in 12% annual decline, as some here argue, that would represent about 600kb/d decline between 2006 and 2007, or a 0.7% decline in world oil production.
For context, the IEA estimates non-OPEC oil supply will increase by 1.1mb/d, or 1.3% in 2007. If TOD suspicions about Ghawar crashing are right, then, that will cut the rate of growth of the oil supply in half, but will not cause the supply to peak (on an all-liquids basis).
So while Ghawar is important to world oil production, its peaking does not mean world peaking. To cause a decline in oil production in 2007 vs. 2006 would require:
Is all that possible? Sure. Maybe even probable. Just keep in mind, though, that all that is what "peak in 2007" means. Just looking at Ghawar is not enough, though.
SA is the only country on earth that claims to have signifigant spare capacity.
All of the models that show increasing world oil supply show huge increases in SA's production.
Now Ghawar produces 5 out of SA's 9mbd.
if Ghawar can't grow, or is even declining that means SA can't grow its production to any signifigant degree.
That means the world's production won't grow much beyond 85mbd if at all.
That's the import.
Evidence? Just because you believe something does not make it true.
April's IEA report puts 2007's non-OPEC supply increases at 1.1mb/d, continuing a strong growth trend from the latter half of 2006. They do not appear to be assuming that Ghawar is going to increase production at all, much less account for any substantial fraction of world oil supply growth.
You're making an assumption that Ghawar is much more important than it really is.
The EIA's predictions (which I use because they're free, unlike IEA's) forsee KSA growing to 17.1mb/d by 2030 (unlikely, IMHO, but we're testing their model). If we assume that Ghawar remains 55-60% of KSA production, that would require just under 10mb/d from it, or an increase of 4.5mb/d from its level last year (pre-declines). By contrast, the EIA sees total world oil supply growing to 123.3mb/d, or 38mb/d higher than its current level.
If Ghawar cannot grow, world oil production will grow only 12% more slowly.
If Ghawar declines to zero, world oil production will grow only 26% more slowly.
And that's assuming EIA believes Ghawar will continue to represent the majority of KSA production, which is probably a bad assumption. Nevertheless, even making that assumption shows that Ghawar is not the determiner of when oil peaks - a peak would require near-term and long-term disruptions to expected oil supply of many times the size of what we might get from Ghawar.
Those disruptions might well happen, of course, but fixating obsessively on Ghawar won't tell us much about them.
Those disruptions might well happen, of course, but fixating obsessively on Ghawar won't tell us much about them.
In the face of the coming troubles it must be rather cathartic to do SOMETHING, ANYTHING over which you feel you have some control ... and a mega analysis of Ghawar is an intriguing intellectual technical exercise which might fit the bill here.
Whilst the Ghawar technical "results" are indeed fascinating, they are unprovable until reality arrives to confirm (or refute) them ... and even then, like you PTE, I'm not sure if the state of Gharwar's oil production is key to the global oil situation.
Kaiser,
What you are doing is lieing with statistics.
Two bottom up analysises (Ace and the recent Swedish PHD theisis) show there is no 1.1 mbd growth from non opec.
If you look at the Swedish report you'll see that the difference between the best case and the worst case is almost entirely derived from Ghawar.
I don't have the time to go digging though the reports to quote out the numbers. I'd be a waste of my time anyway.
No - I'm quoting statistics. As in, providing some evidence to back up my claims.
I very much wish other people would do that. Citing evidence to back up one's claims is a great way to check whether those claims are actually right. There's no better way to debunk a claim than to search for evidence to support it and only be able to find evidence undermining it.
Your original claim was:
"All of the models that show increasing world oil supply show huge increases in SA's production.
...
if Ghawar can't grow, or is even declining that means SA can't grow its production to any signifigant degree.
That means the world's production won't grow much beyond 85mbd if at all."
i.e., you strongly implied that Ghawar was the defining factor in whether world oil supply could grow, and that all models recognize this.
Your implication is false, as demonstrated by EIA's model - even their "reference case" has 90+% of oil growth coming from non-Ghawar sources, and their "high price" case - which has KSA contributing less than 10% of world supply growth - has little or no Ghawar-based growth in it.
And if a Swedish PhD student was the world authority on oil production, that would mean rather more than it does now.
I read his thesis; my first thought was "they give out PhDs for that?" It was a passable summary, but the thesis requirements I'm familiar with put a much stronger emphasis on original research and production of a body of knowledge. It read like a very long term paper, and that's not what a PhD thesis should be.
Yet you have the time to post dubious and unsupported claims that 5 minutes reading will tell anyone are nonsense? It's a waste of your time if you don't quote numbers.
That you believe something does not make it true.
Right now, all you're doing is saying things that you believe to be true - faith-based reasoning. The strength of your faith in Ghawar's importance is not convincing, though, in large part because it's misplaced. Check the numbers for yourself - world oil production is so huge that even Ghawar is only a minor player.
The EIA's model assumes that because demand rises, production rises. They don't identify where this extra production comes from cause they can't.
You have seen Aces work. Is it not credible?
And here is the other analysis I refered to
http://publications.uu.se/abstract.xsql?dbid=7625
Let me know if you find a flaw in its reasoning. No faith involved.
You're right, it doesn't have much original research in it. He justs adds up the claimed production for the biggest fields in the world. Pretty simple, pretty tough to screw up. And the only way he gets world production to rise is to get Ghawar to rise.
BTW quoting bogus stats is lying with stats.
To PTE and others - I agree that Ghawar is not everything and there is false logic involved in saying that when Ghawar peaks, Saudi will peak and so the world will peak.
However, Ghawar is the biggest fish in the pond, with lots of published data, providing the opportunity to probe Saudi reporting standards.
At present, it looks like Ghawar has produced a lot of oil (as has Abqaiq) accounting for a significant portion of Saudi production. The more that has been produced from Ghawar and Abqaiq means that they must have produced a lot less else where.
Can Saudi production grow with Ghawar in decline as depicted here? Possibly yes IMO, but probably not a lot and not for long.
What false logic is that?
The utter lack of a logical chain from observation to conclusion:
1) (Future?) Observation: Ghawar has peaked.
3) Conclusion: The world has peaked.
To have any kind of logic at all, you'd need something connecting #3 with #1. The one that people appear to be using is:
2) Assumption: Nothing other than Ghawar can significantly increase production.
As I showed, though, that's false, at least according to major short-term production forecasts (IEA/EIA). Considering that the last 20 years of production growth have all been from non-Ghawar sources - including strong non-OPEC growth in the last 6 months - that's a huge assumption. So huge, in fact, that it's a very clear case of the logical fallacy of Begging the Question:
1) (Future?) Observation: Ghawar has peaked.
2) Assumption: The non-Ghawar world has peaked.
3) Conclusion: The world has peaked.
Faulty logic.
Pitt, you are something else.
I don't know who you are arguing with, cause that's not what I said.
And you just go ahead and believe in those EIA numbers. According to them we'll be at 100mbd in 2020. No need to worry at all.
When did I ever say you had said it?
You asked me to point out the false logic in an argument posed by EM that he didn't attribute to anyone. I pointed out the false logic, as per your request. Now you're getting angry and accusatory.
The reason for your upset is purely your flawed assumption, namely that I was talking about something you'd said. If you re-read what I wrote, you'll find there's nothing to get angry about - it's just a dispassionate analysis of a (flawed) argument.
No anger, just bewilderment.
Why go to the trouble of constucting a straw man when earlier in this thread I laid out my argument?
I wasn't responding to your argument, I was responding to what you asked about what Euan said. Do try and keep up.
(Your "argument" - which appears to consist of "I believe the Swedish guy who didn't test his model at all" - is not so much wrong as a leap of faith. If you want to talk about that, respond to the post of mine that is talking about it.)
If Ghawar is presently in decline, I agree with you that the KSA can probably maintain and perhaps increase production for a while, but only if it can gear up to drill thousands or at least hundreds of additional wells per year.
Notice the conditional. The problem is that the rigs aren't there, and a state owned oil company that deals almost exclusively with mega projects may not be the best at dealing with the smaller stuff. It won't be as easy from this point forward.
Are you mad?? His model is full of assumptions, most of them poorly analyzed. For example, he asserts that fields will follow a particular exponential decay pattern, but as far as I can tell provides no statistical analysis of how well his model fits previous data.
That one flaw alone means his model is wholly unreliable. Fitting a model and then totally failing to analyze the quality of the fit is, for the key model in a PhD thesis, unforgivable.
Ug - plus he's using 2P as his URR, but appears to have no analysis of how that value changes over time or with price.
Basically, he's come up with a model that's strongly dependent on parameters and jammed in parameters that "felt good" without apparent analysis of their actual quality; consequently, his results are little more than his own opinion.
And if the stats I was quoting were bogus, you'd have a point.
But I guess smearing your opponent is much easier than providing your own evidence, especially when you don't have any evidence.
The simple fact is this: non-Ghawar growth has been robust for decades, has been robust in recent years, has been robust in the last six months, and is forecast to be robust for the next year. Non-Ghawar growth is far more important than Ghawar growth, or even than Ghawar decline -- the expected case of non-Ghawar growth from the major forecasters is larger than the worst case of Ghawar decline from the near-peakers.
Am I saying they're wrong? No.
What I am saying is their fixation on Ghawar is woefully misguided, and their contention that "as goes Ghawar, so goes the world" is a huge unsupported assumption.
What goes on with Ghawar pales in comparison to what's going on in the rest of the world. If the doomers are right about Ghawar and the EIA/IEA are right about the rest of the world, the doomers lose - oil supply still increases substantially over the year.
I would like to say that all the analysis done on the Oildrum has all the data sources backing it publicly available and more important the logic behind the correlations and cross correlations. I have serious doubts about the competency oil the EIA to do more than collect and collate numbers they have been given.
If you have to question that who you should be questioning since its your tax dollars paying for them to make some pretty dreadful mistakes.
From reading I assure the debates on the oildrum and other peak oil sites are not fringe a LOT of people know what we have done. At any time anyone could step forward with a small amount of transparency and refute our claims. In the case of KSA they could even you data they have already published. This has not happened in the almost two years I've been following peak and in fact has in general not happened to my knowledge since the 70's. If your wish to refute the work done on the Oildrum then I'd say the bar is set pretty high if you can't come provide verifiable original source data then its no longer a valid argument.
The burden of proof is not in our court.
Or confirm them, but that hasn't happened either.
If the situation is as dire as the doomers say, there's plenty of reason for that information to be leaked - millions of lives are on the line. If the situation is as rosy as the cornucopians say, there's no reason for that information to be leaked...other than to appease a tiny internet community.
A probabilistic analysis of the "information leak" argument does not support your views.
Of course it is.
People here are asserting that Aramco is flat-out lying about its reserves. It's a strong claim, and requires strong evidence.
People here are asserting that the major world energy bodies - IEA and EIA - are either lying or completely incompetent. Strong claims need strong evidence.
People here are asserting that the world's biggest producer (Russia) is about to crash, despite years of steady growth. Strong claim (which keeps being wrong), needs strong evidence. And, no, HL isn't evidence - it's a model that RR showed was substantially unreliable.
People here are asserting that a modest drop in oil supply will lead to billions of deaths and the collapse of civilization, despite the fact that even halving world oil production would leave more per capita than most people live on today.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. To say that the burden of proof is on others to refute your claims is utterly laughable.