Key sections of super-giant Ghawar field may be "watering out";
Why does Senator Levin say "we're not going to cut off funding for the troops" in Iraq??
Stuart Staniford at The Oil Drum says this discussion is "not introductory." No, surely it isn't. There is no way that I understand all of the oil field concepts involved. However, the upshot of this post, previous cited posts, and a great deal of debate and discussion attached to all of these posts is that the largest Saudi oil field, Ghawar, will play out in one to two decades.
This is no small matter. This single field produces about 5% of all the oil produced in the entire world.
The way oil is produced at Ghawar involves the injection of water in order to force out the oil. At some point, mostly water will be produced and not much oil. It will have "watered out". Indications are that this is happening now.
Including handy references to the entire discussion, Staniford writes of the
hypothesis that watering out of North Ghawar is the main cause of declines in Saudi production in the last couple of years. Readers getting up to speed may want to read the following earlier posts which document most of "The Oil Drum Ghawar Project":
In many cases, the comments contain a great deal of additional analysis and value beyond the posts themselves...
Do go read this stuff. There are several competing points of view, but they are beginning to merge upon a concensus that Saudi Arabia is no longer capable of increasing oil production in a sustained way. In fact, Saudi output involuntarily is declining at an alarming rate.
Of course, the implications of this are staggering. What country can function as swing oil producer if Saudi cannot? Perhaps in ten years, Iraq? Maybe. Plenty of reporting on Iraq's potential may be found on the net. A typical number used for Iraq's potential production intensity is cited HERE, "Iraq might be able to pump up its production to as much as 6 mbd by 2010 and 7-8 mbd by 2020".
But the US project to harness control of development and production of Iraqi oil has hit a roadblock that if looked at honestly would be called armed indigenous resistance. Hence, US troops are destined to remain there both under the policies of President Bush, or ostensibly competing strategies offered by Democrats alike.
Senator Carl Levin (D-MI, Chair of Senate Committee on Armed Services) cleared up the point on ABC News today. He said that in the end, the Democrats will continue to fund war in Iraq against the will of the American people for the indefinite future.
Though he says, "What we should do, and we're going to do, is continue to press this president to put some pressure on the Iraqi leaders to reach a political settlement," what this really means is that the Democrats are all for the colonial project. The "benchmarks" Levin and the Democrats speak of include "dividing the oil resources."
This is code for what I have discussed before, that the new Iraqi oil law will give "executive managers of from important related petroleum companies" control of Iraqi oil valves, thus taking direct control of world swing oil production–what the Saudi’s have been in charge of since the Texas Railroad Commission lost its power due to the depletion of Texas oil reserves after 1971.
The only way to keep these "executives" in charge will be to keep thousands of American troops in Iraq for an indefinite time.