Saudi’s crown jewel has more oil

Straddling over an area bigger than neighbouring Qatar and housing more than six per cent of the world’s oil wealth, Saudi Arabia’s Ghawar is yet to be fully explored though it has been pumping crude for more than half a century.

Ghawar is by far the world’s largest oilfield and for this reason the government-owned Saudi Aramco terms it the Gulf Kingdom’s ‘Crown Jewel’.


…Nearly 57 years after it was brought on stream, the field is still pumping more than half of Saudi Arabia’s total crude output and believing that it has an even bigger potential, authorities are planning to embark on a new development scheme that could offset produced oil and maximise its reserves.

Rebuffing persistent claims by experts in the West and other countries, Saudi Aramco says the field is not ageing and its reserves could be even larger.

“Since its discovery, the enormous Ghawar has kept oil experts on their toes. In mid-2007, the Ghawar Integrated Assessment and New Technology (Giant) team, an interdepartmental group working on a long-term visionary endeavour to better understand and characterise the oilfield, came across an interesting finding while looking at ways to maximise the reservoir’s oil recovery percentage,” Saudi Aramco said in its quarterly bulletin, Dimensions.

Emirates Business 24/7