Peak Oil Has Arrived! The 3 Largest Oil Fields in the world have peaked!
The 3 Largest Oil Fields in the world are "going down".
The #1 Saudi Aramco Ghawar field:
Saudi fields overall are in decline at 8% a year:"There are published reports that Ghawar has from 30-64% water cut. 50% means that half the fluids brought up the well are water. Today the decline rate is 8%. Thousands of barrels of water per day of production must be added each year.
Excerpt: Prologue "I was standing on a sand dune in Saudi Arabia's "Empty Quarter," the vast, rust-red desert where one-quarter of the world's oil is found, when I lost my faith in the modern energy economy. It was after sundown and the sky was dark blue and the sand still warm to the touch. My Saudi hosts had just finished showing me around the colossal oil city they'd built atop an oil field called Shaybah.
Engineers and technicians, they were rattling off production statistics with all the bravado of proud parents, telling me how many hundreds of thousands of barrels Shaybah produced every day, and how light and sweet and sought-after the oil was. Saudi oilmen are usually a taciturn bunch, guarding their data like state secrets. But this was post 9/11 and Riyadh, in full glasnost mode, was wooing Western journalists and trying to restore the Saudis' image as dependable long-term suppliers of energy, not suicidal fanatics or terrorist financiers. And it was working. I'd arrived in the kingdom filled with doubts about a global energy order based on a finite and problematic substance oil. As we'd toured Shaybah in a spotless white GMC Yukon, though, my hosts plying me with facts and figures on the world's most powerful oil enterprise, my worries faded. I'd begun to feel giddy and smug, as if I had been allowed to peek into the garden of the energy gods and found it overflowing with bounty.
Then the illusion slipped. On a whim, I asked my hosts about another, older oil field, some three hundred miles to the northwest, called Ghawar. Ghawar is the largest field ever discovered. Tapped by American engineers in 1953, its deep sandstone reservoirs at one time had held perhaps a seventh of the world's known oil reserves, and its wells produced six million barrels of oil a dayor roughly one of every twelve barrels of crude consumed on earth. In the iconography of oil, Ghawar is the eternal mother, the mythical giant that makes most other fields look puny and mortal.
My hosts smiled politely, yet looked faintly annoyed, not, it seemed, because I was asking inappropriate questions, but because, probably for the thousandth time, Ghawar had stolen the limelight. Like engineers anywhere, these men took an intense pride in their own work and could not resist a few jabs at a rival operation. Pointing to the sand at our feet, one engineer boasted that Shaybah was "self-pressurized" its subterranean reservoirs were under such great natural pressure that, once they were pierced by the drill, the oil simply flowed out like a black fountain. "At Ghawar," he said, "they have to inject water into the field to force the oil out." By contrast, he continued, Shaybah's oil contained only trace amounts of water. At Ghawar, the engineer said, the "water cut" was 30 percent.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up. Ghawar's water injections were hardly news, but a 30 percent water cut, if true, was startling. Most new oil fields produce almost pure oil, or oil mixed with natural gas with little water. Over time, however, as the oil is drawn out, operators must replace it with water, to keep the oil flowing until eventually what flows from the well is almost pure water and the field is no longer worth operating. Ghawar wouldn`t run dry overnight: depletion takes years and even decades; however, daily production would continue to fall steadily, and the Saudis would be forced to tap new fields, like Shaybah, to maintain their status as the world's preeminent oil power. While such expansions were never a problem during the heyday of Arab oil wealth in the 1970s and early "80s, times are much tighter today for Saudi Arabia and for most other petrostates.
As we drove back toward the airstrip for my flight home, my hosts bombarding me with more facts and figures, I couldn`t shake the feeling that the gods of energy might not be as powerful and eternal and confident as I had imagined.
March 8, 2007
* Oil prices increased due to increasing US, Chinese, etc demand in the strong economy of 2003 and early 2004. Once it became clear that oil prices had risen pronouncedly above OPECs desired $22-$28 price band, KSA(Kingdom of Saudi Arabia) initiated a large voluntary increase in production in the spring of 2004 in an attempt to bring prices back into the band. They were not able to raise production by more than 1 million barrels per day (mbpd), however, and this was not sufficient to stabilize prices, which have never returned to the price band. The band was abandoned a year later.
* After continuing to increase production very slightly for several more months, Saudi production began to decline in late 2004. This was only arrested by the arrival of the first KSA oil "megaproject", the 800 thousand barrel/day (kbpd) output from the combined Qatif/Abu Sa'fah fields (690kbpd of new crude and condensate production). This 690kbpd arrested declines during early 2005, but never sufficed to raise production above the peak achieved in 2004. There was no sign of Saudi increases in production in response to the high prices of 2005 and since, nor to the loss of production from the Gulf of Mexico hurricanes in 2005.
* Production began to decline again in 2005, and at greater rates through 2006. This was only arrested briefly by the arrival of oil from the 300kbpd Haradh III development in late spring of 2006.
* If these trends were to continue, Saudi oil production would halve over the next five years. However, it seems more likely that KSA will find ways to bring smaller fields on line and start to mitigate the decline within this time period.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2331
Description:
"Petroleum is now so deeply entrenched in our economy, our politics, and our personal expectations that even modest efforts to phase it out are fought tooth and nail by the most powerful forces in the world: companies and governments that depend on oil revenues; the developing nations that see oil as the only means to industrial success; and a Western middle class that refuses to modify its energy-dependent lifestyle.
But within thirty years, by even conservative estimates, we will have burned our way through most of the oil that is easily accessible. And well before then, the side effects of an oil-based society -- economic volatility, geopolitical conflict, and the climate-changing impact of hydrocarbon pollution -- will render fossil fuels an all but unacceptable solution. How will we break our addiction to oil? And what will we use in its place to maintain a global economy and political system that are entirely reliant on cheap, readily available energy? Brilliantly reported from around the globe, The End of Oil brings the world situation into fresh and dramatic focus for business and general readers alike.
Roberts talks to both oil optimists and oil pessimists, delves deep into the economics and politics of oil, considers the promises and pitfalls of alternatives, and shows that, although the world energy system has begun its epoch-defining transition, disruption and violent dislocation are almost assured if we do not take a more proactive stance. With the topicality and readability of Fast Food Nation and the scope and trenchant analysis of Guns, Germs, and Steel, this is a vitally important book for the new century."
"One of the things to keep in mind is that the original oil column was 1300 feet thick. Today, it is less than 150 feet thick. One must draw the necessary conclusions that most of the oil has been removed from Ghawar."
from the book The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World
In order to keep up the right pressure for the production of oil they inject 7 million barrels a day of seawater in order to produce only about 4 to 5 million barrels per day of oil. [4/11 = 36% oil; 64% water]
February 24, 2004 New York Times:
"The big risk in Saudi Arabia is that Ghawar's rate of decline increases to an alarming point," said Ali Morteza Samsam Bakhtiari, a senior official with the National Iranian Oil Company. "That will set bells ringing all over the oil world because Ghawar underpins Saudi output and Saudi undergirds worldwide production."
Twilight in the DesertThe factual basis of the book is over 200 technical papers published over the last 20 years which individually detail problems with particular wells or particular fields, but which collectively demonstrate that the entire Saudi oil system is old and fraying. Based on his analysis, Mr. Simmons asserts that sudden and sharp oil production declines could happen at any time. Even under the most optimistic scenario, Saudi Arabia may be able to maintain current rates of production for several years, but will not be able to increase production enough to meet the expected increase in world demand. Eventually, the reckoning day will come and the world economy will be confronted with a major shock that will stunt economic growth, increase inflation, and potentially destabilize the Middle East.
#2. Burgan, Kuwait - in decline
Kuwait: Saturday, November 12 - 2005:
It is incredible revelation that the second largest oil field in the world is exhausted and past its peak output. Yet that is what the Kuwait Oil Company revealed about its Burgan field. Chairman Farouk Al Zanki said :"The peak output of the Burgan oil field will now be around 1.7 million barrels per day, and not the two million barrels per day forecast for the rest of the field's 30 to 40 years of life."
He said that engineers had tried to maintain 1.9 million barrels per day but that 1.7 million is the optimum rate.
[Kuwait has produced an average of 2.1 million b/d in recent years]
However, it is surely a landmark moment when the world's second largest oil field begins to run dry. For Burgan has been pumping oil for almost 60 years and accounts for more than half of Kuwait's proven oil reserves.
Forecasts wrong [going "downhill", yes. but a lot faster]
Last week the International Energy Agency's report said output from the Greater Burgan area will be 1.64 million barrels a day in 2020 and 1.53 million barrels per day in 2030. Is this now a realistic scenario?
#3. Cantarell, Mexico - in decline
Bloomberg, March 1, 2005
Officials of Mexico's state-owned oil company PEMEX have announced that Mexico's largest oil field, Cantarell, will enter permanent decline this year.
5-11-2007
Cantarell has actually begun to decline. The most recent Upstream (May 11, 2007) quotes Jesus Reyes Heroles, the Pemex leader as saying that Cantarell would produce only 1.5 million barrels per day in 2007. This is compared with over 2 million in 2004.
06-06-2007
"In about three years, experts believe Cantarell will produce less than half a million barrels per day!""Production from Cantarell will begin to decline in 2006, and the drop-off will be brutal-14 percent a year, according to Ramirez." David Brown, "Politics Cloud Mexico`s Promises," AAPG Explorer, Oct. 2004, p. 16
"This situation has long set off alarms inside Pemex. But the rest of Mexico doesn`t see the scope of the coming challenge, according to Shaw.
I don`t think the public in general understands that they`re about to hit a brick wall, he observed." David Brown, "Politics Cloud Mexico`s Promises," AAPG Explorer, Oct. 2004, p. 16
The Peak Oil Crisis: Alarms Are Sounding
contact Obama! 