Ghawar Field
Ghawar (Arabic الغوار al - Ghawar, DMG al - Gawar ) is the largest oil field in the world. It is located near the city of Hofuf in Saudi Arabia and was discovered in 1948/49. It is estimated that originated 60 % to 65% of the oil production of Saudi Arabia in the years 1948 to 2000 from this one oil field. The current flow rate is estimated at 5 million barrels (one barrel = 159 liters ) per day, which (~ 89 million barrels per day) corresponds to about 5% of world production.
First estimates assumed that Ghawar contains a total of 170 billion barrels of oil and about 60 billion are eligible. The following estimates of the recoverable amount of oil in Ghawar varied 70-170 Gb. Saudi Aramco announced that by April 2010 as 65 billion barrels of oil had been promoted in Ghawar. At the same time it was announced that originally were included in recoverable reserves in the field more than 100 billion barrels. The field also provides about 57 million cubic meters of natural gas per day.
Currently 8 million barrels of sea water are pumped into the oil field to maintain crude oil production per day. By 2005, was intensively discussed, the Ghawar oil field had reached its peak oil and located itself on the falling slope of the production curve. So reported the energy specialist website Energy and Capital in an article dated 9 August 2006 a spokesman for the state -Saudi oil production company Saudi Aramco have added a feed reduction of the oldest oil fields Aramco (including Ghawar ) of 8% per year.
His peak Ghawar had 30 years ago, but the production was then deliberately reduced. In 1981, 5.7 million barrels a day promoted. However, the recession in the U.S., as well as the glut of oil in the 1980s led Saudi Aramco to cut production in order not to let the prices continue to fall, thus was the Russian oilfield Samotlor for a few years, the field with the highest delivery rate. Investments in the field between 1994 and 1996 increased the production again to over 5 million barrels - more than Samotlor has ever produced.
The U.S. oil investment banker Matthew R. Simmons had in his 2006 book Twilight in the desert out of oil. The coming oil shock in Saudi Arabia - Opportunities and risks the alleged funding decline of Ghawar described as signs of a global production peak and warned of an era marked by great economic, political and social tensions turbulent downturn.
The novelist Andreas Eschbach used this thesis Burned as background of his novel.
Abdallah Jum ʿ a, CEO of Aramco, on the other hand holds (2008) the fears of the global production peak for drastically exaggerated.
The was given by Prof. Michael T. Klare from Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass.. in the spring of 2006, the following assessment of the U.S. Department of Energy counter:
" The most striking evidence of this changed view of things is the new estimate of the U.S. Department of Energy in the new International Energy Outlook, which was submitted in July 2005. We recall that this publication had forecast in the previous year, the Saudi production will in the first quarter of the 21st century to increase by 12.3 to 22.5 mdb mdb. The new edition, however, provides for the same period a growth of only 6.1 mdb, which is less than half of the predicted increase in 2004. Today, the U.S. Department of Energy predicts that Saudi oil production will rise only to 16.3 mdb by 2025. This U-turn is not explained in detail in the publication. But it can be assumed that the analyzes submitted by Simmons and other skeptics now also affect the official thinking in Washington. "