Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Saudi Arabia's Ghawar oilfield - King of Kings
Ghawar is by far the world's biggest oil field, both in size 280km long and 30 km
wide and in production. It has produced some 55 billion barrels of oil to date,
and in 2007 was still producing 5.1m b/d - or 7 percent of the world's total
conventional oil output. It also contains enough gas, alongside the oil, to be
counted in the top ten gasfields of the world. Ghawar is probably the one field
in the world where peaking and decline of production could, by itself, have a
measurable effect on the world market and oil price. Saudi Aramco claims that
peaking is some way off, because Ghawar still has “more than 70bn barrels of
remaining reserves”.
However, in his 2005 book
Twilight in the Desert
, US oil expert Matt Simmons
cast doubt in general about the sustainability of Saudi production, and in par-
ticular about Ghawar's future output. Simmons suggested that, as they moved
intensive exploitation of the field progressively down the field from north to
south, Saudi Aramco engineers seemed to assume they would find a continu-
ation of the same extraordinary productivity they found at the start. The US
expert questioned the wisdom of that assumption.
The International Energy Agency's
World Energy Outlook
of 2007 did not
include Ghawar among the “post-plateau” fields, because although Ghawar's
production in 2007 was below its historical peak of 5.6 million barrels per day
reached in 1980, it was less than 15 per cent below it. The observed post-peak
decline rate is thus a mere 0.3 percent per year.
Gas UK, the industry association, reckons there are still 25bn barrels of oil
equivalent potentially out there
.
The UK has been criticized for getting through its oil and gas reserves
faster than other North Sea coastal states, a point underscored by the
present decline in production. Britain is no longer self-sufficient in either
oil or gas. In 2008 it produced 1.54m barrels a day of the 1.7m b/d that it
consumed, and 69.3 billion cubic metres of gas out of the 93.9bn cm that
it consumed. But it can also be argued that the UK was bound to deplete
its oil and gas quicker than Norway and the Netherlands, simply by virtue
of having a larger population than those countries. At all events the North
Sea has been an undeniable, if temporary, godsend to UK public finances.
In 2008-09 it contributed £13bn in taxes, and helped contain the trade
deficit. The UK's 2008 trade deficit was £44bn, but it would have been
£84bn in the red without domestic oil and gas production.
Offshore oil production goes back to the start of the twentieth century
in many parts of the world: off the beaches of California, on lakes between
the US and Canada and between Texas and Louisiana, and off Azerbaijan
in the Caspian (which in 1900 was providing half the world's petroleum).
