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KHURAIS, Saudi Arabia: Deep in the Saudi desert, 28,000 Asian
workers are racing to get a giant oil processing complex ready to
help King Abdullah keep a vow to meet world demand for crude.
In a year’s time, the Al-Khurais field will be
supplying 1.2 million barrels a day of Arab light crude to thirsty
global markets, under a tight schedule set by Saudi Aramco, the
national oil giant.
The king, and other top Saudi officials,
promised at an oil summit they hosted in Jeddah on Sunday to
increase current production by 200,000 barrels a day to 9.7 million
barrels and to supply any further increase in global demand.
In temperatures that seldom fall under 38
degrees Celsius during the day, workers from Indonesia, Bangladesh,
India, the Philippines and other nations wear hoods against the sun
as they finish the hundreds of kilometers of pipelines, three
600,000-barrel storage tanks, 15,000-horsepower pumps and a
bomb-proof control center that make up the $10-billion complex.
Khurais is city-sized but can only be reached up
a seemingly endless desert road, with truck tires and carcasses of
burned-out cars strewn along the sides, and black camels roaming in
the dunes.
Aramco took journalists this week to its latest
“mega project,” about 160 kilometers east of Riyadh, which will
handle oil extracted from its Khurais, Abu Jifan and Mazalij fields.
The company calls it “the largest industrial
project in the world.”
Together the three fields have estimated
reserves of 27 billion barrels and their joint daily production of
1.2 million barrels will be more than OPEC’s three smallest
members Indonesia, Qatar and Ecuador, according to Aramco. OPEC is
the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
World demand is growing by about 1 percent a
year, and Saudi Arabia has vowed to invest tens of billions of
dollars to take production capacity to 12.5 million barrels by the
end of next year and eventually to 15 million if the demand is
there.
The Aramco vice president for production, Amin
Al-Nasser, said 500,000 barrels a day will start coming out of its
Khursaniyah field in August, and by the end of the year 250,000
barrels will be coming from the Shaybah field and 100,000 barrels a
day from the Nuayyim field.
But Khursaniyah is eight months behind schedule
and Saudi Aramco has faced questions about whether it can get
Khurais ready on time as well as the sustainability of Ghawar, the
world’s biggest oil field currently producing five million barrels
a day.
Nasser said he was “100-percent confident”
that Khurais would be ready on time and insisted that Aramco’s
other fields are nowhere near peak production.
“If we want more oil, we open the valves
across the fields and none of them is yet wide open,” he said.
He said the depletion rate—the amount of oil
it produces each year as a proportion of its reserves—averaged
about 2 percent where other countries average 4 percent to 9
percent.
Aramco is dismissive of “peak production”
theorists who said Saudi Arabia’s production will now start to
fall as it has in the North Sea and Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay.
Nasser said the theory does not apply to his
country, even though the Ghawar field has now been in operation for
50 years.
The Saudi firm has embarked on a huge operation
to find new fields to add to its estimated 260 billion barrels of
crude oil reserves.
Aramco research chief Muhammad Saggaf said that
over the next 20 years the company’s overall resource base—a
more theoretical measure of reserves that may or may not be
available—could grow to 900 billion barrels from the current level
of 735 million.
“We have never failed to replace what we have
produced through our exploration program, and it is expanding year
by year,” Nasser said.
-- AFP
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