Ghawar Is Dead!
The Wide-Spread Use of Advanced Extraction Techniques are
Killing the Mother of All Oil Fields
By Matthew S. Miller
“How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe
away the entire horizon?
What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science- 1882
“My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a plane.
His son will ride a camel.”
- Anonymous Saudi Sheik – 1982
“Ghawar, Ghawar she gave and gave; They sucked her dry like
mankind’s slave;
The Sheiks told us that big oil lie; And all those people had to
die.”
- Lyrical History - 2082
03/09/07 "ICH" ---- -I’ve watched in shock and awe in recent
days, shaking my head and wringing my hands. Yet another
unremarkable narrative of celebrity intrigue entered the echo
chamber of the mainstream media system and its
24/7-positive-feedback-amplification-loop to emerge as biggest
news event - no, the earth-shaking cultural event of the year.
This time it is…Anna Nicole is dead!
Her mournful supplicants conduct vigils in her memory and
quietly reflect upon her iconic life, wishing her soul Godspeed.
Meanwhile, we are left to ponder the paternity of her
unfortunate offspring and the symbolic meaning of her celebrity
status for posterity. All the while we wait with bated breath as
Wikipedia straightens out the facts of her untimely demise.
Hers was the quintessentially American tale of the technological
metamorphosis of East Texas trailer trash into the bearer of the
trophy titties for an oil tycoon. Her bare breasts in the pages
of Playboy reaffirmed the greatness of our country! She pulled
her self up by her bra-straps and made her way in the world. We
imagine that the indelible image of her “candle in the wind”
life will never be extinguished because she really lived the
collective dream. Sometimes it’s funny how fake-life makes
contact with real-life.
It was also announced recently, without the same media feeding
frenzy, that another queen of mass-culture is dead too. Few of
us even know her name. Rather than being the personification of
the contemporary zeitgeist, she is one of the cornerstones of
what Marx called global capitalism’s base. She was an integral
part of the concrete material conditions that make our peculiar
form of social organization possible. Her name is Ghawar, and
she is the mother-of-all oil fields. She was once a veritable
sea of light sweet crude 174 miles long and 12 miles wide, under
the sands of the eastern province of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
(KSA), and now she is dead.
Ghawar is by far the largest conventional oil field ever
discovered. Since first tapped in 1948, Ghawar has produced some
60 billion barrels of oil and accounted for 60-65% of Saudi
production from 1948-2005. While actual field by field
production numbers remain a Saudi State secret, Ghawar is
estimated to produce more than five million barrels per day or
6.5% of the planet’s daily production total of 84 million
barrels.
Ghawar’s obituary has already been written, but the Saudis have
thus far prevented the appropriate authorities from entering the
house to inspect the body. We have only second hand reports of
her demise. Of these accounts, the most notable is investment
banker Matthew Simmons’ book Twilight in the Desert: The Coming
Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. Simmons assembles a
picture of declining Saudi production from publicly available
technical reports written by Saudi-Aramco’s own reservoir
engineers in recent decades. His portrayal of the situation is
dire indeed. He claims that “When Saudi Arabia peaks (enters the
unavoidable state of permanent production decline) the world,
categorically, has peaked.” It looks like the 2006 numbers
confirm Simmons’ 2005 prophecy.
The writers at the Oil Drum, a data driven oil analysis website,
after assessing the production data from several independent
reporting agencies, claim that Saudi production is down a
whopping 8% in 2006 from 2005 numbers. The decline would have
been closer to 14% without the addition of the Haradh III
mega-project. They assert that Saudi Arabia has now officially
peaked and that the pace of production decline there is likely
to accelerate. Remember, Ghawar accounts for 60% of Saudi
production.
A correlate of this geologic prediction is their prediction of
the seismic effect this news will have on KSA political life.
This is not positive; think terrorist attacks, followed by
beheadings, followed by rebellion, followed by more beheadings,
followed by boots on the ground - American boots.
Ghawar has been on life support for some time. The wide-spread
use of advanced extraction techniques like water-injection and
horizontal-brush drilling are the hallmarks of field maturity
and imminent production collapse. Brush drilling is to an oil
reservoir what a straw is to the paper cup wrapped around a
chocolate shake –it allows you to suck out every last bit of
creamy goodness quickly and efficiently. Unfortunately, Ghawar
is not the only oil royal in critical condition.
The obituaries just keep rolling in. “Kuwaiti oil production
from the world's second-largest field (Burgan) is ‘exhausted’
and falling after almost six decades of pumping” according to
the chairman of the Kuwaiti state oil company. The L.A. times
tells us that “Production at Cantarell, the world's
second-largest oil complex, which provides about 60% of Mexico's
crude, averaged 1.78 million barrels a day in 2006. That's a 13%
drop from 2005.” The famous North Sea basin and it gigantic
Forties Field, the oil find that made Britain a petroleum
exporter for the past 20 years, is about to experience a
precipitous production decline. Back in 2000 we learned that
China’s only super-giant field, Da Qing was also at death’s
door. These fields and others like them provided the mother’s
milk, in the form of light sweet crude, which nourished the
global capitalist system now enshrined and deified in American
mass-culture.
In America we know all about big dreams and dead oil fields. Our
East Texas field, discovered in the 1930’s, gave us the energy
we needed to forge ourselves as a superpower in the cauldron of
WWII and it paved the way for the elaboration of the post WWII
American dream: a car, a job, and a house in the suburbs for our
returning troops. This version of the dream supposed the fact
that East Texas oil was cheaper than water to be a permanent
condition. This dream died in 1971 when the contiguous lower 48
states peaked as an oil province.
In all honesty, these old oil fields don’t really die, they just
fade away as their power to shape culture through increased
production progressively, sometimes dramatically, diminishes.
Interestingly enough, Anna Nicole Smith, a mere cultural
artifact also destined to fade dramatically in a few more news
cycles, was actually a person born Vickie Lynn Hogan in 1967 in
Houston, Texas. This city is the heart and soul of America’s and
the world’s fading oil industry. Before she was a celebrity
queen she was a stripper and a waitress in a roughneck town who
followed a dream.
When Anna Nicole’s beautiful breasts are lowered into the
ground, the event will subconsciously affirm and immortalize
America’s collective delusion; the belief that conspicuous
consumption, in all its forms, can go on forever. While one
queen of kitsch may have died, the dream of getting something
for nothing, of recreational driving and super-sized eating, of
perpetual entertainment, and of an idyllic future in the suburbs
where one may realize the imperative of personal accumulation
through gold-digging matrimony, will be renewed and confirmed.
Those fake breasts nourish the fake dialectic which has
colonized our collective consciousness. Our fraudulent,
media-fueled, optimism will again, temporarily, pull the curtain
over the reality behind the scenes and present us with a red,
white and blue facade of tranquility.
Screaming “Ghawar is dead” and lighting a lantern in the
daylight, confirms one ‘certifiable’ for most Americans. Peak
oil is here now! Saying even this engenders looks of complete
incomprehension among the masses! Peak oil means the death of
the American dream embodied in those cold, dead, marvels of
plasticity on Anna Nicole’s chest. Hell, it means the end of
plastic surgery! It means the end of economic growth and
everything that entails. Our collective fake-life can’t go on
much longer after its real-life sources of nourishment dry up
and become the ashes of history. It won’t be long now until we
realize that our world has come unplugged from the ancient
sunlight that provides its artificial neon glow.
Matthew S. Miller, Ph.D (
MMiller33@ucok.ed ) is a lecturer for the Department of
Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma.
© Copyright by Matthew S. Miller 2007
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