May 02–It seems everything in energy is higher than it has been in two decades — the price of oil, the number of rigs drilling around the world and the number of conventioneers attending the Offshore Technology Conference, which kicked off at Reliant Center on Monday.
The energy world has descended on Houston for the OTC, where attendance is expected to easily top last year’s gathering of 51,320.
The annual conference, which started in Houston in 1969, pulls energy workers from 110 countries, from Kazakhstan to Canada and Scotland to Syria.
Marketing efforts of the oil and natural gas companies from around the globe also reflect the energy attitudes of their home countries.
At the station for UK-based MacDermid Offshore Solutions, which has applied specialized technologies to declining North Sea basins to wring more hydrocarbons out of those old fields, marketing materials carried a tag line of “Yes we can!”
The booth for China Oilfield Services Ltd. is emblazoned with “We can do better.” China Oilfield Services is a state-controlled energy service company run by Chairman Fu Chengyu of the China National Offshore Oil Co. Last year, Chengyu sparked a bidding war for Unocal as part of his country’s efforts to secure oil and gas assets around the world.
In a speech to a standing-room-only crowd, Saudi Aramco’s vice president of exploration and producing, Abdullah Allah S. Al-Saif, said his country will ramp up offshore exploration in the Arabian Gulf between now and 2010.
The kingdom, whose desert oil reserves are the largest in the world, will deploy 20 percent of its rigs in offshore waters to explore for new oil and gas fields, Al-Saif said.
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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Copyright (c) 2006, Houston Chronicle
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.
