Neopo thankyou for the useful information you have contributed to our understanding of Saudi production/reserves it will help our understanding immensely.

I don't think it ever became accepted as being rude to clarify incorrect assumptions with data and corrections to analysis error. The danger in not doing so is that those who are less learned in this matters can be easily led astray.

By the way feel free to start up a thread titled something like "the Saudis are lying arseholes....I can't prove it but I know it anyway!" I'm sure it will be immensely popular.

World Needs to Face Saudi Output Limits





Interestingly he pretty much agrees with what former head of exploration Sadad Al-Husseini says. i.e. they can get to 15mb/d but the forecasts of getting more than that are too optimistic.

No need for thanks - glad to be of help

No, but it is rude to go about it the way you seem to do.
and bobcousins saying that Bobbyboy is clueless.
Yeah thats not rude is it?
Oh no worries as I do feel free to start a thread entitled whatever I want it to be titled within the range of the CoC.

I am sure there are plenty of people here at PO.COM who are just as concerned about SA production as you and I.
Did you read that article I posted?
"SA says they do not have 260bb but 1.2 trillion barrels of reserves."
This doesnt strike you as odd???

You may have chosen to believe that but I believe you are in a very tiny minority and yeah that doesnt make you wrong but it does seem a bit ignorant to easily dismiss such absurd claims.

And lets not even dwell into the relationship between the neocons and the Sauds...........

I think if you want a realistic view of SA production possibilities without the politcal shroud then we could look at Iran whose only excess production is sour.
It seems the same applies to all this "extra capacity" SA keeps trying to find buyers for to no avail.
This "excess" everyone talks about seems to be sour crude.
And that is one indication of a depletion is it not???

Hmm perhaps understanding petroleum production is similar to understanding religion and they have colleges for that so if one wishes to understand one must attend and serve their life in the industry just to begin to grasp these concepts.

yeah right!!!

Its time to put your mouse, graphs and charts away and listen to common sense.
Judge them by their deeds and listen closely to what they say.
I think you will have a completely different outlook on it all regardless of what your peers and your education has programmed you to think.

Deity save us from nintendo/joystick geekologists!!!!

Antimatter - now just stop it!!!
You and I both know that SA production knows no limits.
The road goes on forever and the party never ends.......

Fear, denial and rationalization.
As stated in another thread - the educated are far better at this then the uneducated.
They have their beliefs and plenty of rhetoric to back it up.
People like Rockdoc will continue to believe in what they have been "taught" rathen then depend on their own intelligent observation.

My president has never even spoken the words PO so I suppose everything is just PEACHY and this is just a conspiracy on a grand scale.
Been wanting one of those new hummers anyways!!!!

Saudi and Aramco statements + "insider" knowledge = truth???
Yet according to the Sauds the price of a barrel should be $25???
All they have to do is produce a few extra million barrels of sweet light per day and we would see the price of crude fall significantly.
Since part of SA's strategy is to keep the price reasonable so as to not provoke alternatives and conservation - wouldnt they be doing that right about now if they could???
Yeah thats just my undereducated assumptions based on my own uneducated observations....silly me.
Someone must be conspiring against us and it is becoming fairly apparent that some of these people post here on the PO forum!!!!

that is a bad comparison....not the same geology...source rocks are completely different as is the reservoir etc. Apples and Oranges I'm afraid.



actually that is incorrect...as I've said before outside of graduate school I've been working in this industry for 30+ years...much of it dealing with Middle East petroleum geology. What I am trying to achieve here is putting together all of the information out there without any belief system...this is called data mining. By doing this one often finds out important trends, clues to what is actually going on. I do this rather than read two books (Campbell and Simmons)....which I suspect you have done, to formulate my opinions.

You are entitled to your opinions as is the weatherman, Bill Clinton and Curious George. That doesn't make them, however, worth anything

You asked for evidence that water injection could damage a reservoir and I provided it. I have to dispute your assertion that this does not make the evidence relevant to the likes of Saudi Arabia's fields. Fractured carbonate reservoir rock (typical Middle East rock) has been shown to give a lower recovery under water injection than primary recovery:





Imperial

Additionally I would add that it helps explain why the likes of Shaybah, Khurais, Manifa and co have been left until last. They are extremely complex reservoirs and consequently have low recovery factors. Also it dispels the myth that Middle East fields are somehow special and are able to have a higher recovery factor than in the rest of the world; this may be so for Abqaiq but not for other fields such as Shaybah.



Thanks for pointing this out. I meant to write carbonate but got confused with the Saudi aquifers which are predominately sandstone.


Meaningless? You consider someone who is the chief reservoir engineer for Chevron going under oath against his peers stating that their collective behaviour had been damaging the Saudi reservoirs when everybody else denied it to have no meaning . That sort of whistleblower behaviour is not common, it would have been far easier for him to have gone along with the group yet he had the guts and a conscious to tell the truth. The water cut line is misleading. For example since 1999 they have stopped drilling horizontal wells as they were watering up so quickly hence when a well waters up it is shut off and left out from the statistics showing the average well's water cut; rather cunning I may add. It is thus dangerous to take the water cut figures at face value.



Actually you are wrong here. They mean 5% of 2P which according to IHS is 18 so giving 0.9 billion barrels not the "over 2 billion barrels" you state. Furthermore just to show that they are not refering to OOIP consider this:

Page 15 Ghawar 48% depleted.

Page 21 Ghawar cumulative production 55 billion barrels.

Therefore 55/0.48 = 114.6 billion barrels OOIP confirming my OOIP figure of 110 billion barrels. Are you really suggesting that Aramco are confirming my OOIP figures?




Well no thats not correct they are up to date as at February 2005 when the numbers were published.

It is pretty apparent that your estimates are vastly different from theirs. Indeed your OOIP estimates are less than their recoverable reserves.[/quote]



No really? IHS Energy is a politically compromised organisation. Just look at their CERA division and their flawed analysis (depletion underplayed). They have to implicitly present data that there is plenty of oil left in the world. That is what their clients expect and that is what they provide. You said it yourself, they just ask the Saudis how much they have got and just take it at face value! . As for Saudi insiders they are no more reliable just look at what Antimatter posted:


That works out to 15 million x 365 x 50 = 273.75 billion barrels before production decline sets in. That is beyond optimistic.


"permeability does not come into play in this calculation". Coming from an experienced petroleum geologist I am amazed! I can only assume you thought I was calculating my numbers on a gross pay basis. The OOIP numbers are calculated on a net pay basis where permeability is a factor so to claim I have been 'completely arbitrary' is incorrect. Secondly you are misrepresenting my position. It is not as simple as saying the Saudis are lying you are thinking on the microscale when you need to try and understand the bigger picture. As I have pointed out before in this thread to FatherOfTwo:

Where is your reference for this? You link to a model study that does not deal with real rock (what kind of Middle East rock is this…in fact it looks closer to the Asmari to me and not the Arab)….. the most important reservoir parameter in this type of study is matrix permeability…the example they use seems mostly in the tens of millidarcies with a peak into the hundred plus range where in Ghawar the average matrix perm is in the 300’s getting up to 600 in the Ain Dur area. The issue here is that with minimal matrix permeability you have a very difficult time replenishing fractures rapidly during infinitesimal reservoir drawdown. As a consequence there is a tendency for water by-passing along fractures. When the matrix perm is high they continue to provide oil to the fracture highways. As well the model does not specify what the viscosity of the oil is. This is very important in terms of sweep efficiency. As well, and a very important fact is that wettability can change throughout the history of production...that being said if Ghawar was oil wet you would not see the kind of production you are seeing..the Aramco reservoir models referenced in the SPE incorporate water wet assumption and they get good match with observed data. Also Ghawar has an expanding gas cap….the model does not encorporate gas expansion drive from what I can see. Reservoir models are great things but they are not very reliable unless they are ground-truthed with the real thing.



I would certainly like to know where you get your recovery factors from. The Aramco presentation talks about depletion, which relates to the amount of the URR that has already been produced, not the ultimate recovery factor. Perhaps you can explain to us the details of how Abqaiq is different from Shaybah, Khurais, Manifa etc ? From my own reading on the subject there are many similarities but also some differences. One of these differences (Shaybah is ultra light Arab which gives it the essential viscosity of refined diesel) should actually improve the recovey factor compared to parts of Ghawar where you are looking at medium to light Arab.



First off the reason I said it was meaningless to this discussion is his testimony was well in advance of when they observed the water flood breakthrough, as shown in the curve and as noted in a few of the SPE papers. At that point in time he had no idea of what damage might or might not have been created . Also if you have ever worked in this industry the one thing you will realize is that there are always people with an axe to grind. This is what is called heresay evidence. You of course got this from Simmon's book....I don't remember any hard evidence being produced at that hearing?



I am afraid you are dead wrong there. At Haradh, increment 2 which started in 2001 was implemented entirely with horizontal wells. During this period they also drilled the first of two maximum reservoir contact (MRC) multi-lateral wells with up to a 5 km reservoir intersected area. There plans are to implement increment 3 (supposedly started in 2004) with only MRC wells (SPE 93138, 2005; SPE 87959, 2005). At Ain Dur during the period 1999 through 2004 they drilled a number of short radius horizontal sidetracks from existing vertical wells in order to access “attic” oil which helped them reactive wells that had been formerly shut-in. They drilled a number of new horizontal long reach wells into the upper 10’ of the Arab D. It is indicated that all future drilling in Ain Dur will be with MRC wells based on the success at Haradh (SPE 93439, 2005). And if you know of any field that actually reports water cuts from wells that are not producing I think we would all like to hear about it…..by definition they have no water cut because they are not producing….duh.
Shutting in wells with excessive water production is all part of reservoir management. In SPE 93439 they talk about their water management scheme at Ain Dur where they conducted a number of water shut-off jobs from 1999-2005 using various types of plugs to shutoff high perm zones. They mention that 77% of those jobs resulted in reduction of water cuts by greater than 50% whereas only 4% were unsuccessful (ie. Water cut reduction less than 25%). Here's an example of the A9 well from Ain Dur before and after Water shut off work over...





OK …lets get this right once and for all. The depeletion figures noted in the Aramco slide relate to the amount of recoverable oil that has been produced to date. So in the example of Ghawar total 48% depletion means the recoverable reserves are 115 GB, not the OOIP. In terms of reconciling this with the various Aramco statements….the 2P reserves they carried in 1997 according to IHS Energy were 114 GB…..the 2P was subsequently upgraded in 2003 to 140 GB. So the Aramco presentation would make sense if indeed they had simply moved probable reserves into the proven category and possible reserves into the probable category from 1997-2003. This doesn’t seem that unusual given the size of the field and the fact they were building lots of gas/oil/water separation plants, drilling horizontal wells and doing other technics to recover stranded oil. In regards to Shaybah the production profile indicates you are correct about the total production to end 2003 (about .985 GB) but the depletion factor of 5% relates to URR. As a consequence the recoverable reserve ends up being 19.7 GB. According to HIS Energy as of May 2004 the 2P reserves for Shaybah were 21 GB and the proven reserves were 20 GB. This seems to match. So from what I can see you are still confused by the concepts of OOIP and URR.



That is just silly. I have worked for several companies that buy IHS energy products. If there was any inclination that the data was being cooked in any manner those various subscriptions (which in my current case amount to about $2MM/yr) would be immediately cancelled. Oil companies are the main clients of IHS ….it is not in their interests to have the concept out there that oil supply is limitless. If IHS was actually interested in appeasing their main clients they would be putting out low numbers not high ones. I have had dealings with this company since the late seventies when they were PetroConsultants….if anything they have considerable professional integrity. Errors that are present are not made on purpose.



Well this must mean you have access to a whole bunch of wireline logs and core data from Ghawar! Please provide us with your plots to justify your downgrades in reservoir thickness. Nice try….when talking about OOIP the only time you might use permeability as a cutoff for net reservoir in these sort of rocks is to cutoff at lets say 0.1 md (note that Roberto Aguilera the original authority on fractured reservoir engineering would claim in fractured carbonates you should make no permeability cutoffs at all). Rule of thumb in most carbonates is that anything above 3% porosity will generally allow oil to get into pore space unaided. The following is a plot from one of the SPE papers showing generalized porosity in the Arab D.



Note that you need to have a cutoff of about 15% porosity to make any difference to net reservoir. So for OOIP ….ie. it doesn’t matter whether it will produce or not, it just had to get into the reservoir and be stored ……net carbonate reservoir is basically gross carbonate reservoir minus any shales or anhydrites. If you want to reduce recoverable reserves due to poorer permeability in certain zones that is fine….I still would like to see the evidence.

As you know I am a proponent of the Saudis publishing all of their supporting data.....but that ain't gonna happen. As such we are left with trying to figure out what is there through information that has been released in one manner or another. Your view that the Saudi view just has to do with "the Arab way" gets me a bit twisted off simply because I have many Arab friends who do not think in anyway different than most westerners.....notwithstanding that such a concept might apply to when they make statements such as "we have enough oil for a hundred years" but it doesn't apply to when they make specific statements on OOIP, proven and/or proven plus probable reserves...which they have made on numerous occassions.

And finally NEOPO


This is pretty classic....how do you know Simmons is absolutely correct? Have you worked in Saudi Arabia on these fields? Have you been into the SPE database and come up with the same conclusion? For Christ sake he is an investment banker....no doubt an intelligent one but not a technical person who could look at the SPE work and critically evaluate it. He might well be right....but he might also have his head up his rich ass.

Bp was "caught" overestimating reserves and so was Chevron and I am sure the list of others doing the same is long.

SA has a very good reason to lie.
No one wants to cause the financial panic that will ensue once the world knows the truth.

I am sorry but they have very little reason to tell the truth and plenty of reason to hide their actual reserve numbers.
Lets not forget Opecs quota system.
Wheres the transparency???
Why hide anything at this point if indeed there is plenty of oil???
Governments have called for this as well as plenty of the worlds financial chiefs yet still no transparency or foreign audits.

I must add that Simmons is rich and could just as well take his money and hole up somewhere indefinately and quite comfortably.

When Bartlett met with Bush I thought to myself "watch what Bartlett does after this meeting".
If he would have calmed down and not been so adamant about preparing for PO with his constituents then I might wish to believe your very optomistic claims yet he did not and now he seems more determined then ever.
Bush is in bed with SA man...theres no denying it.
SA will say and do as the neocons want or SA will be the next Iraq.

Iran isnt so easily bullied.
I do not think it is a coincidence that we now have Iran virtually surrounded.

Yes this may not all apply to the title of this thread yet I feel it is all very relevant.

I appreciate your work wether I agree or not but I dont think you should discount the pessimist here so easily.

I would like to know if you are preparing for PO or think its just something that our/your children will have to deal with?
Maybe if I knew your inner thoughts I could better judge your motives for believing these optomistic numbers.
If you are not doing anything to prepare for PO....well thats sort of telling isnt it??
Kinda provides a motive doesnt it?
So...how do you really feel?

I have no motives other than as a scientist I am captivated by puzzles. One of my Masters thesis supervisors worked with King Hubbert at the Shell Research Centre for a number of years back when they were all young Turks doing all the ground breaking work on rock mechanics...yes that is what Hubbert was most famous for was his understanding of pore pressure phenomena. As a consequence I was exposed to the whole idea of peak oil back in the seventies.(part of our course work)...and it has continually kept me thinking about it all these years.
As to am I preparing....how do you prepare for something that could happen in five years or perhaps in ten years or perhaps in thirty years? The one thing most folks agree on is there will be a peak of some kind (sharp, bumpy, whatever) but noone can agree on a date. This is extremely important as to how you plan. If you freak out right now and drag your teenage kids out to the wilderness and make them learn to drink birch bark tea......suddenly it turns out ...opps screwed up....looks like peak won't happen for another twenty years. Basically you just fucked up their entire lives because you freaked out. I'm one of the ones who believes in a soft landing , I also believe that what you are seeing in the market right now has little to do with peak oil other than awareness...and that is probably a good thing.
I am an old converted hippy by classification.....basically I think good about the human spirit....other than than the human spirits who want to horde and keep guns.

I thank you for shedding light on your history and why you are a soft lander.

I must disagree with the "fuck their lives up part" as I know way more people who are unhappy with thier current life and it isnt just the poor people who are discontented.

It is not that hard for me to imagine a world where we do our own work ....again.
"As it was then again it will be and though the course may change sometimes rivers always reach the sea" being an ex hippy I am sure you have heard these words before somewhere

I have a few friends who were raised on a farm and even though it was hard work they usually have nothing but fond memories.
I will NOT be "fucking" my kids life up by buying back the farm and teaching them the way it use to be or more likely the way it will be again.

Anyways the Sauds are lying but I cant prove it
Judge them by their deeds man as that has always been a very good measure.

How do you prepare for the inevitable??? you start today.
I will now leave you and bobbyboy to it as it is true that I have only read alot yet never set foot in the middle east and never studied oil reserviors.

As I've stated before, I agree with Rockdoc in that until we get much more transparency out of the Saudis (and every producer) we are just doing educated guesses. That iswhat Simmons advocates, btw. That the Saudis have a motive to lie or exaggerate doesn't tell us whether they are or, if they are, what they are lying about. Assuming 1980 numbers as correct doesn't seem logical to me, as do numbers that magically stay the same year after year.

Hmmm I came to see you at the "edge of chaos" and I must say that your blog was ok
I would suggest that the PTB actually wish to be "stymied" in the middle east.
We do not want to be "finished" as we do not wish to leave in the first place = policing the region and staying in place to conquer other regions.

Plus we are giving the "terrorists/freedom fighters" an easy target away from the PTB comfort zone.

I think they read SUN TZU instead of "Lawrence of Arabia".

"When weak appear strong - when strong appear weak"

They attacked over a STRENGTH issue (control of WMD's) yet are actually weak because of the very real energy WEAKNESS issue (OIL DEPENDANCE AND DEPLETION).
Ponder that for a few and then come back and throw gold and silver at my feet.
*note* gasoline or petroleum can be substituted for gold and silver
Its OK - happens all the time

Its ok - you are almost THERE - Dont stop now.

As far as the name of your blog is concerned I want to say that
"Chaos is order unperceived"

I now wish to point out all the lies perpetuated upon mankind throughout history in order to achieve political and economic goals yet to do so would busy up my schedule for years besides the repetitive stress injuries inflicted upon my digits rendering me useless in a utopian garden/farm naked hippy commune type situation and that would not be good now would it?

It is asinine for anyone to suggest that SA is ABOVE deceit and I think it is an injustice to not attempt to read between their lines/lies.
Why lie about this you ask??? Did you really ask that question I ask???!!!

Am I the only one here who sees this for what it is???
Of course not yet it seems I am one of the few to openly admit it.

What would provoke a very rich man to quit his job, write a book and relentlessly stomp the world red with his message???

I bet the PTB wish they had not hired this man as part of their ENERGY TASK FORCE - oh thats so not very funny

As the PTB lose credibility daily I am not sure if thats a good indication or not.
Two elements closely tied sending out different messages to the world???
HOW CAN THIS BE - some cry......

Its clear that some people "get it" and some people "do not".
We are energy junkies plain and simple.
Lie, cheat and steal yet even a junkie sometimes admits that they are junkies and when that happens all the other junkies resort to monkeyshines.

I know all this verges on conspiracy yet damn it people... conspiracies happen and we generally find out very little well after the fact.
All I ask is that you look deep within.
They have motive - they have reason - they lie.

How many f***ing pictures of the Sauds and the Bushies do we need to be convinced that they are in bed together??

We trained Osama and the village people.
Who was the head of the C*I*A at the time?

I wonder who the next boogey man will be.

As I slowly let my mind go as opposed to losing it completely I only wish now that I had not said one word.....not one peep....

At least this way Bobbyboy and rockdoc123 would still be going at it and maybe through that process we could know/learn/hear more.

again - come back Bobbyboy and come back Rocdoc123 - I didnt mean to interupt with my observations of mankinds general downward tendencies and deceitful ways.
I did not mean to repetitiously point out the obvious and how it applies to this equation.
I did not mean it - I simply could not resist................

"whats that mother???"...."the men with the pretty jacket are here to take me to the white room with black curtains?"....."ok I will be right down"........

A retort from experts puts some salient points up about the failure of Simmon's logic in his book. Most damaging is the fact that the Saudis have only explored a fraction of their land.
This report has the market thinking.

^

Report deflates oil crisis warning
Ross Smith rebuttal to Simmons a hot item in oil circles

Keith Kalawsky
Financial Post


Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Anyone who is anyone in the oil-and-gas sector has read the book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy, an alarmist tale by Texas investment banker Matthew Simmons.

The Coles Notes version: Production from Saudi Arabia's giant oil fields has probably peaked and is poised for a swift decline. The result is that the rest of world will suffer an expensive supply shortage.

But analyst Jim Jarrell at independent research firm Ross Smith Energy Group Ltd. in Calgary has written a rebuttal that has become the most-read research report in firm's history. The report has been picked up by oil executives, engineers and even international diplomats.

"As petroleum engineers, we do not support the key conclusions and speculative theories contained in Twilight, and notice numerous technical gaffes," Jarrell noted in the report published this month.

"We think there is a lack of clear context and consideration of market dynamics around key issues identified in Twilight."

The cornerstone of Simmons' argument is a series of research papers written by local Saudi oil experts and published by the Society of Petroleum Engineers since the 1960s. The research tackles all kinds of arcane technical matters, such as the effects of injecting water and gas into Saudi reservoirs to maintain proper pressure and production.

Simmons concludes from these reports that there are deep and previously unknown problems afflicting Saudi Arabia's oil reservoirs. In turn, there is a high probability that the kingdom's production capacity is waning.

"Taken together and properly interpreted, they show us that the geological phenomena and natural driving forces that created the Saudi oil miracle are conspiring now in normal and predictable ways to bring it to its conclusion, in a timeframe potentially far shorter than officialdom would have us believe.

"For far too long, this sustainability question was ignored because conventional wisdom was so sure that Saudi Arabia's oil was plentiful, inexpensive and inexhaustible. This idea all but extinguished curiosity and fortified trust. Sadly, there was never a scrap of reliable data to support this belief."

Here are some of Simmons arguments boiled down, followed by Ross Smith's rebuttals:

- Simmons argues that the efforts of Saudi Aramco, the kingdom's national oil company, to control the so-called "water cut" -- the percentage of water mixed with oil when extracted from a well -- is evidence that the country's reservoirs are jeopardized.

The engineers at Ross Smith object to that conclusion, noting that the water cut is relatively low and has been reduced over four of the past five years. "This does not happen by accident, and in fact points to proper reservoir-management practices by Saudi Aramco," Jarrell wrote.

- Simmons also argues that Saudi Arabia's exploration efforts haven't uncovered new deposits of any decent size to fuel future production. However, Saudi Arabia has only drilled 69 exploration wells over the last 10 years. With such large existing reserves that are declining at a low rate, why would Saudi Arabians spend money to find more oil? At this point, 23 reservoirs out of 80 discovered are enough to meet market needs for the next 50 years. Saudi Arabia was ranked No. 1 by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2000 for the potential of its undiscovered resources.

- Simmons is skeptical of estimates that Saudi Aramco wields 260 billion barrels of proven conventional oil reserves. However, Saudi Aramco's methodology for booking reserves is as conservative as any public company following U.S. regulations, Ross Smith contends. Of the 260 billion barrels of proven reserves, 50% are developed, but this escapes mention in Twilight.

- Simmons points to "smoking guns" in a 1979 research report to a subcommittee of the U.S. Senate. The report apparently uncovered problems documented in engineering papers and predicted the start of an irreversible decline at North Ghawar, part of Saudi Arabia's largest field, between 1989 and 1992. But this decline never happened, Jarrell notes. The water cut improved at Ghawar, and so did new technology for drilling and data gathering. "While provocative then, the concerns of the 1979 report have been proven wrong and irrelevant now," according to Jarrell.

Engineering research is written by nerdy engineers eager to impress their peers. The bigger the problem solved, the smarter the engineer looks, so there is an incentive to make challenges in Saudi oil fields sound worse than they are.

Ross Smith's report shows the value of independent research. Without it, Simmons' much-hyped book would go unchallenged.

© National Post 2005

Yeah, but there's this secret government report...Doubts Raised on Saudi Vow for More Oil

"The Saudi problem is that its output heavily relies on the unique Ghawar oil field. And Ghawar's sustainability is a well-kept secret. The only hint that there have been problems was the drilling of some 200 horizontal wells over the period 1992-1999. But these new wells both ushered a recovery boon and are a Damocles Sword hanging over Ghawar's head. For, as Mr. Laherrere judiciously pointed out: "when water level hits the horizontal well, it is finished. Ghawar has not yet peaked but when it will it is going to be a cliff !". A REALISTIC VIEW OF LONG-TERM MIDDLE EAST PRODUCTION CAPACITY, Bakhtiari.


According to Exxon the last time discoveries outpaced production wordwide was back in 1986, and Saudi Arabia was well explored by Aramco before it was nationalised during the 70's. The only parts of SA not touched by 30 years of exploration by this company when it was in American hands was some land near the border with Iraq, a section of the empty quarter, and out into deepwater. Tell me that SA are not relying on deepwater to save us.


What the hell does this mean? Aramco is no longer a public company so they can report whatever they like in the way of reserves. All we need to know that SA is lying about their reserves is that after they upped them from c.170BB to c.260BB without any new discoveries to back this up they have produced around 45 BB's since yet their so-called reserves are still stuck at c.260 BB.


On what evidence!


Does the same condemnation not stand for Ross Smith's engineer's with the publication of this shill piece?


Let's see Simmon's spent years reserching this subject in a painstaking fashion, each point backed by reems and reems of verifiable sources. Whereas this guy whips together a puff piece on the back of an envelope denigrating Simmon's research without offering any new evidence at all for his assertions.

Clients of Saudi Arabia typically say the same things when defending them;

"Technical papers are a stupid way to do analysis because they just deal with the problems"

"Investment Bankers don't know how to read technical papers"

"They (clients of SA) don't see any problems and prove it by the release of trust-me statements."