Out of Gas Planet

I've been pondering a couple incidental pieces of information I have heard recently. (Truth is I haven't researched it very much, though I plan to. I just like the mental exercise that the following thoughts provide.)

The first piece of information I heard is that Saudi Arabia is beginning to pump ocean water across overland and then deep into the ground into their underground oil wells. They are using a certain technology or mechanism to put the water there to raise the oil to where they can reach it. This was taken to mean that they may be running low on, and may soon run out of, oil.

April 22, 2008, 1:59 pm
Peak Oil? Saudis Squeeze the Stone Even Harder
Posted by Keith Johnson

As oil reserves get harder and more expensive to suck out of the ground, one big question looms: Is Saudi Arabia facing “practical peak oil” or the real thing?

Saudi Arabian officials made waves last week with an announcement that the kingdom would voluntarily limit future oil production, in order to leave oil wealth “for future generations.” Last weekend, Saudi officials said that the world’s biggest oil producer won’t be diving into new exploration projects after next year, citing sluggish Western demand and the search for alternative fuels to petroleum.

So are the Saudis smartly shepherding their oil resources? Or are they obliquely acknowledging that getting them out of the ground will be increasingly difficult and expensive?

Neil King in the WSJ reports today (sub reqd.) on the challenges facing Saudi Aramco as it launches its last big project before taking an upstream hiatus: The tricky development of the big Khurais field, which could pump more than 1 million barrels of oil per day. The paper says:

Even in Saudi Arabia, home to more than a quarter of the world’s known recoverable reserves, the age of cheap and easily pumped oil is over. To tap Khurais, Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco, has embarked on the most complex earth- and water-moving project in its history. It is spending up to $15 billion on a vast network of pipes, oil-treatment facilities, deep horizontal wells and water-injection systems that it calls “one of the largest industrial projects being executed in the world today.”

With crude oil approaching $120 despite sluggish demand growth in the U.S., the idea of “peak oil”—that the world’s oil glass is already half-empty—is increasingly gaining currency. Other once-formidable oil producers like Russia, the U.K., and Mexico are all seeing production decline as fields age. While Aramco has been very good at squeezing the maximum amount of oil out of each reservoir, even the world’s biggest oil producer is finding that it’s no longer shooting fish in a barrel:

“Khurais and [offshore field] Manifa are the last two giants in Saudi Arabia,” says Sadad al-Husseini, a former Aramco vice president for oil exploration. “Sure, we will discover dozens of other smaller fields, but after these, we are chasing after smaller and smaller fish.”

Unlike previous mammoth fields, Khurais needs a push while it’s still young—in the form of sea-water injection to get wells pumping. And that’s tricky business: Aramco seismologists spent years poring over rock formations to build their gameplan.

It’s costly, too: The paper reports that Saudi costs for adding new oil production have quadrupled in recent years, from $4,000 for each new barrel per day of capacity to about $16,000 for each additional barrel.

As Western leaders implore OPEC to boost production, and the OPEC producers with the most play coy, the question remains: How much play is really left in the global spigot?

http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2008/04/22/peak-oil-saudis-squeeze-the-stone-even-harder/trackback/

The second bit was something I read. It was predicted that if China continues over the next 20 years to experience the same rate of growth it has had over the past 20 years, then they would require per day the entire amount of oil currently produced per day in the world.

So, I've been thinking about the possibility that maybe the Earth's supply is finite and what that would mean in escatological terms. I may read Revelations again just to see if it's hinted.

PS. I don't necessarily want to turn this into a Velikovsky discussion, but I thought it would be worth mentioning. If Velikovsky's research is to be believed and oil and/or natural gas was introduced to Earth by the passing comet, now planet, Venus, then it would make sense that we have a finite amount left in the earth.