2nd Largest Oil Field Drying Up Faster

[LSK]

By Peter J. Cooper
KUWAIT: It was an incredible revelation last week 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. 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, Chairman Farouk Al-Zanki told Bloomberg. He said that engineers had tried to maintain 1.9 million barrels per day but that 1.7 million is the optimum rate. Kuwait will now spend some $3 million a year for the next year to boost output and exports from other fields.

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. This is also not what forecasters are currently assuming.
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?

http://www.kuwaittimes.net/localnews.asp?dismode=article&artid=37595069

Interesting to see that theres hardly any MSM coverage of this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgan_Field

[roamer65]

1. I'm sure Ghawar in Saudi Arabia will not be much further behind.

I have read that Ghawar extraction is almost 50% oil, 50% seawater now. Ghawar is the world's largest oilfield. Declining production will be the norm with these older fields. If you put apply too much pump pressure, the honeycomb structure that holds the oil begins to collapse and oil is trapped.

[Dogmudgeon]

8. Many of the holes are producing over 90% seawater

I don't know what the overall, field-wide figures are. I'm not sure they are available; OPEC and many of the big oil companies are deliberately fudging production and reserve figures. In Saudi Arabia, such data are state secrets; and I can't blame the oil industry for trying to prevent a panic, even if they are acting in their own self interest.

The Cantarell (Pemex -- in Mexico) is losing production so quickly, it is said to be collapsing. So that's the Big Three. And most American, Canadian, Russian/Ukrainian, and Chinese oil production is high-tech, which drops the EROEI pretty low.

2007 doesn't look like it's going to be a good year for the oil industry.

--p!

[IDemo]

9. Ghawar water cut at 90% ??

I hadn't seen that. The last I have read is upwards of 55%, but that was in 2004. And that was with 7 million barrels (then) per day of water injection. A large factor in the EROI of Ghawar's oil is certainly the power requirements of the injection pumps. From a 1973 article in Saudi Aramco World: No pumps previously existed in the marketplace large enough to handle all the water used in the injection program at Ghawar, so Aramco had to go out and have such pumps specially designed and built. The results were 20,000-horsepower giants able to handle a half-million barrels of water a day at approximately 2,000-pounds-per-square-inch pressure.

And, (obviously not from SA World):

the next picture shows that to the right of the line the oil is gone and all that is left is water The solid circles are or were oil producers. the open circles with arrows through them are where the water is injected to the reservoir to push the oil towards the producers (On the picture below this is from the right to the left. You can see that in this area, in 1996 the water had encroached halfway across Ghawar.The water must have moved further to the west today, 8 years later.

[hatrack]

10. Ghawar data is still opaque, but . . .

With the scale of waterflooding now in progress, I think 55% is probably a pretty conservative estimate.

Matt Simmons recently discussed talking with Aramco engineers who described what they're pulling out of parts of Ghawar as "oil-stained water", though that's anecdotal as hell.

[thereismore]

2. No coverage: numbers are not sexy enough for murkan public. nt

[lonestarnot]

3. This should be getting someone's attention besides us!

[Caution]

4. so the shortfall would be about 4 billion barrels. no big deal right?

By today's pricing that's about $200,000,000,000 in lost revenue for them. Minor error in their estimating. Kinda like the way they have a minor error in their understanding of climate science.

[Warren Stupidity]

5. ooops.

Hey I just finished reading up in scientific american why ethanol is pretty much hopeless. Good thing WE HAVE DONE ABSOLUTEY NOTHING for the last thirty years or so to prepare for the inevitable. Does anyone wonder what $500,000,000,000 (about what we have spent in Iraq) would have done in terms of alternative sustainable energy infrastructure research and development?

[brokensymmetry]

7. Per the SAIC report...

the world needed to invest one trillion (with a T) dollars per
year for 20 years to mitigate the problem...assuming, of course,
that we started 20 years before peak hit.

So, given that we appear to be at or close to peak...I guess
that a mere $500 billion wouldn't do much.

Does anyone else feel like we're trapped in a Twilight
Zone remake of a Greek tragedy?

[valerief]

6. Bush will want to drill oil in Mars now. nt