Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Joined: Sep 16, 2004 Posts: 4907 Location: Southwest WI
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2008 7:29 pm Post subject: khurais project
I'm sure this has been talked about before, but msnbc is carrying a story about it. Not one mention in this story about depletion of Ghawar or any other Saudi field. Also no mention of the type of oil that is being pumped.
Quote:
KHURAIS OIL FIELD, Saudi Arabia - This massive oil field surrounded by the desolate sands of Saudi Arabia's vast eastern desert feels like the middle of nowhere.
But what happens over the next year at Khurais, one of Saudi Arabia's last undeveloped giant oil fields, could hold the key to what drivers will pay at the pump for years to come.
Under way at Khurais and two other smaller fields nearby is what Saudi Arabia calls the single largest expansion of oil production capacity in history.
Quote:
Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company, Aramco, is spending $10 billion to build the infrastructure to pump 1.2 million barrels of oil per day by next June from the Khurais field and its two smaller neighbors. That alone would be more than the total individual production of OPEC members Qatar, Indonesia and Ecuador.
The project forms the centerpiece of the Saudi plan to increase the total amount of oil it can produce to 12.5 million barrels per day by the end of 2009 — up from a little more than 11 million barrels per day now.
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The political tussle over output masks the challenge Saudi Arabia faces in boosting production capacity by developing giant fields like Khurais.
"That is what people don't appreciate," said Manouchehr Takin, an oil expert at the London-based Centre for Global Energy Studies. "These are major projects, and people don't realize they aren't that easy."
The Saudis estimate Khurais and the nearby smaller Abu Jifan and Mazalij fields hold a total of 27 billion barrels of oil encased in solid rock 5,000 feet below the baking desert.
Saudi Arabia is no stranger to developing giant oil fields. Its massive Ghawar field, with an estimated 70 billion barrels of remaining reserves, is the world's largest.
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Aramco is using hundreds of mostly South Asian workers to build a massive processing facility at the field. More than 150 wells will pump crude to the surface, where water and gas will be separated out. The oil then will be funneled to the country's east-west pipeline for delivery to ships in the Red Sea.
Workers are also building a huge sea-water injection system to pump more than 2 million barrels of water per day from the Gulf into 120 wells. That will maintain the necessary pressure underground to push the oil to the surface.
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Aramco officials say that in addition to geological challenges, they also face difficulty finding enough qualified workers and equipment. The project will use 145,000 tons of steel — almost enough to build two Golden Gate bridges.
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When completed, the processing facility also will be protected by two layers of fences, crash barriers, security cameras and government forces, Aramco says. Al-Qaida has called for attacks against Saudi Arabia's oil facilities to disrupt the flow of crude.
Aramco officials insist that despite the tight construction market, the Khurais project will be ready to produce 1.2 million barrels per day by next June.
But equipment and labor shortages have delayed production at another field, Khursaniyah, which was originally scheduled to begin pumping 500,000 barrels per day at the end of 2007. Aramco officials now say Khursaniyah will come online in August.
Also in the works is the development of the Manifa field, which sits offshore in the Gulf and is Saudi Arabia's only other giant oil field still untapped.
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f all goes as scheduled, Aramco forecasts more than 50 billion barrels of fresh reserves from the giant fields by 2011. That amount alone would give Saudi Arabia the ninth largest oil reserves in the world, not even counting its existing reserves.
They throw around all these giant numbers making us think all is well.
Joined: Oct 23, 2004 Posts: 5928 Location: New Jersey
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2008 8:01 pm Post subject: Re: khurais project
I find this article about Khuris most interesting because the Saudis admit to depletion, spending enormously to slow it, and say the rest of the world is depleting at a 4% rate - up to a 9% rate.
If depletion is even 4% a year, then $140 oil is going to look rather cheap soon. At 9%, roccman will look like an optimist.
Quote:
June 23, 2008, 9:22PM EST text size: TT
Inside Saudi Arabia's New Mega-Oil Field
Saudi Aramco is spending $10 billion to retool the Al Khurais field to produce 1.25 million barrels of light crude a day
Al Khurais is the centerpiece of a Saudi effort to lift production capacity from the current 11 million or so barrels per day to 12.5 million barrels daily by next year. Aramco executives want to emphasize that their approach is conservative and long term. To make the point, exploration and production chief Amin Nasser said that Aramco's average depletion rate—the volume of oil it produces a year as a percentage of reserves—was only about 2%. By contrast, he said other producers and international oil companies average 4% to 9% depletion rates. This approach, he said, lets the Saudis deploy better technology and recover more oil than an energy company under pressure to produce as much as possible before its lease runs out.
Business Week _________________ It's already over, now it's just a matter of adjusting.
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2008 8:31 pm Post subject: Re: khurais project
I will just point out they start the project with flooding. Indeed, they had to spend billions just to build the pipelines to carry the seawater to the fields.
Joined: Sep 16, 2004 Posts: 4907 Location: Southwest WI
Posted: Sun Jun 29, 2008 8:40 pm Post subject: Re: khurais project
I'm being lazy here, but can someone explain this. If SA gets this to pump 1.2mb a day next year...then will it go up or down from that number/and at what point(how long)?
This one field will make them $170 million a day as of NOW. Holy Christ that is a lot of money A couple weeks ago we were watching "TMZ" on Fox and they had a little clip of one of the Saudi princes who was out partying here in the US. He was driving a Bentley or something like that. _________________ Clothing should be optional.
Joined: Sep 16, 2004 Posts: 4907 Location: Southwest WI
Posted: Tue Jul 01, 2008 5:54 am Post subject: Re: khurais project
another article from the NY Times...
Quote:
To help counter the skeptics, the Saudis flew a contingent of journalists from Jidda, on the Red Sea coast, to Khurais last week. The tour was largely a scripted one, with little opportunity to wander the grounds or verify official claims.
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Now the Saudis are deploying an extraordinary engineering effort to bring Khurais’s mile-deep oil to the surface. Seawater will be carried through new pipelines from the Persian Gulf and injected into oil-bearing rock to pressure the oil upward. Usually Aramco pumps seawater into a field only after several years of production, and some skeptics point to this as a reason to doubt that Khurais will live up to its billing. But Mr. Nasser said the huge seawater injection system at Khurais was about cost and logistics, not a sign of a weak field.
Quote:
A variety of new technologies, including multiple lateral wells and microscopic robots swimming through rock pores deep underground, will allow the company to start recovering much more of the oil in its fields, said Mohammed Saggaf, who runs Aramco’s advanced exploration research wing. The company expects to increase the amount of oil it can recover from its fields to 70 percent from 50 percent over the next 20 years, Mr. Saggaf said, adding another 80 billion barrels to reserves.
With all this oil becoming available, the Aramco officials said they were baffled that the market seemed to be behaving as though there were a shortage.
“We’ve asked all the international oil companies that buy from us if they want more oil,” Mr. Nasser said. “But we can’t find customers.”
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A couple weeks ago we were watching "TMZ" on Fox and they had a little clip of one of the Saudi princes who was out partying here in the US. He was driving a Bentley or something like that.
