Saudi Aramco to Increase Arabian Gulf Rigs

By year-end, Saudi Arabia will have 120 rigs operating in the country, up from 85 last year and 54 in 2004. “The offshore is growing,” he said. “We see it as at least 20 to 30 rigs from here on instead of six or eight.” Onshore, Al-Saif talked up the Khurais development west of Saudi Arabia’s massive Ghawar field as the primary way Aramco will boost crude production from just under 11 million barrels of oil per day to 12.5 million barrels by the end of 2009.

Khurais is thought to contain 23 billion barrels of oil reserves, most of it light, sweet crude that’s easy to refine. The adjacent Abu Jifan and Mazalif fields hold an estimated 4 billion barrels. Al-Saif said that the project required 310 horizontal wells to access all of the reservoirs, but together the fields should produce an extra 1.2 million barrels of oil per day by 2009. “This is the largest development in Saudi Aramco’s history,” he said.

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