Can Saudi Arabia Double Oil Production ?  

They think they can. Matthew Simmons would seem to disagree. Even if they could, its debatable as to how long that would make up for depletion elsewhere and ever-growing demand from China and India. And the Russian situation isn't encouraging either.

Saudi oil production capacity could grow from its current 11 million b/d to over 23 million b/d to meet world demand according to Saudi Aramco's President and Chief Executive Officer Abdallah S. Jumah, confounding sceptics who believe that the Kingdom may be approaching, or even past, peak production.

Simmons is asked about this in the interview by "The Agonist":

MRS: I think they have OPEC going to 50mbd by 2030. That means that we must have Saudi Arabia at between 20-35mbd.

SPK: You categorically don't see that as happening, do you?

MRS: Yeah, the chance of that is less than one percent. Now when you get less than one percent it doesn't matter what it is. I also think the risk of actually producing at 10-12mbd has a chance of maybe five percent. Again, I hate to use those numbers but it is just extremely low. The safest production profile for Saudi Arabia over the next decade is to lower their current production by a third to 50%.

Again from the Simmons interview, it would appear he's in the ASPO camp on the question of "how much oil is in Iraq ?".

The most serious problems that the Iraq oil system has is the two old giant oil fields, Kirkuk and Rumelia, were basically around 80-85% of their sustainable oil production in the 80s and 90s and both of those fields have been terribly abused, over the last two years and they finally were able to, about six to nine weeks ago, to let two contracts to have the first serious reservoir studies done of those fields since the late 1970s. And my sense is that what the reservoir field studies will show, if they are done properly is that they basically destroyed those two fields.

And now the question shifts to, well, what about all these structures they have discovered that have basically never been developed? Well Saudi Arabia has 80 of those structures, but for some reason or another in the $50 billion plan of all these old fields they are trying to rebuild, not a single one of the 80 is being tackled. So, I suspect that in Iraq they must be a little bit like Saudi Arabia's structures. You know, they are pushing these things so hard they had the money, and it really isn't that expensive to actually bring on a new field that you've already discovered.

Then there's the question about exploration in the Western Desert. They clearly haven't, but they've explored extensively in Syria and Jordan and in the Arabian Peninsula and they have never found anything. If we were evaluating an IPO of an exploration project in the Western Desert Of Iraq I'd say, "until you found something you couldn't raise any money for it."

The interviewer also threw in an interesting question about the possibility of the existance of horizontal wells from Saudi Araba (or a disputed area at the border) into Iraq - not something I've seen before, but its an intriguing idea. It would certainly be ironic if Iraqi reserves had been historically underestimated and then sucked away to the other side of the border. I vaguely recall Saddam Hussein accused the Kuwaitis of something similar to this in the lead up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait that started the first Gulf War.

SPK: Do you think there is any truth that the wells in the Neutral Zone are long horizontal wells and is it possible to run a multi-model horizontal leg into Iraq and tap it that way.

MRS: No, they can't reach that far. Not that I know of. And the Neutral Zone fields are so crappy. Why bother. Bear in mind that that is the northern extension of the Safiniyah field.

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