As I understand it, all the world's important onshore wells have been recently redeveloped using SOA secondary and tertiary production methods in order to capture the remaining oil. So the Ghawar oil reservoir is now mostly just a thin film of petroleum floating on an huge water reservoir. The Saudi's was among the first to employee horizontal drilling to skim that oil off. (Yibal field in Oman was actually the first. It's production fell of a cliff.) It now seems Saudi Arabia is in chaos. Perhaps because the truth leaked out
Jesus wept. You have been instructed on this numerous times but you keep wandering back to the same completely incorrect assumptions.
Ghawar is not a thin film of petroleum. The water saturation varies across the entire pool. It is an edge water injection drive which displaces oil in front of it. If you actually read the paper you keep posting pictures from (which you obviously haven't) you would realize this.
The horizontal wells which are called Maximum Reservoir Contact wells were drilled not to "skim the oil off" but rather to avoid water coning from fractured zones that could be found on new seismic as well as reduce reservoir drawdown at the same time increasing total reservoir Kh in contact with the well bores. They are nothing like the short radius horizontal wells that were drilled in Oman way back when, completely different.
Suggesting the power struggle over the crown in Saudi has something to do with oil field issues is probably as stupid as anything else you have surmised.