Saudi does not publish the oil field engineering data required to formally verify their reserves. So Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. has undertaken an innovative indirect study of the Ghawar field using satellite imagery and radar data. I don’t have an informed opinion on the validity of the Bernstein study.
…Combing through dozens of high-resolution satellite images of Ghawar going back to 2001, the Bernstein team has concluded in a study sent to clients at the end of April that only part of the vast field “is suffering signs of old age.” On the whole, Bernstein says, the field “is being properly managed” and is experiencing only “mild production-decline rates at worst.”
Critics of the study, including some who have crunched their own overhead imagery, say the Bernstein study is insufficient and the debate over Ghawar’s health is far from over.
…Put into production in 1951, Ghawar remains the greatest treasure of hydrocarbons ever found. The Saudis say the field, measuring about 20 miles wide and 175 miles long, spits out as much oil every day as all the oil wells in the U.S. combined. Its output accounts for around 60% of total Saudi production.
Yet no one outside of Saudi Arabia has any sound data on production rates at Ghawar, or the kingdom’s other huge fields. The Saudi Arabian Oil Co., better known as Aramco, has long been secretive about data on the kingdom’s oil holdings, as are most Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members whose economies are heavily dependent on oil revenue.
“The problem is that silence leads to speculation,” says Neil McMahon, who led the Bernstein study as the firm’s senior analyst. The motivation, he says, “was to confront the whole peak-oil thing with some real data.”
Technorati Tags: Peak Oil
Saudi does not publish the oil field engineering data required to formally verify their reserves. So Sanford C. Bernstein Ltd. has undertaken an innovative indirect study of the Ghawar field using satellite imagery and radar data. I don’t have an informed opinion on the validity of the Bernstein study.
…Combing through dozens of high-resolution satellite images of Ghawar going back to 2001, the Bernstein team has concluded in a study sent to clients at the end of April that only part of the vast field “is suffering signs of old age.” On the whole, Bernstein says, the field “is being properly managed” and is experiencing only “mild production-decline rates at worst.”
Critics of the study, including some who have crunched their own overhead imagery, say the Bernstein study is insufficient and the debate over Ghawar’s health is far from over.
…Put into production in 1951, Ghawar remains the greatest treasure of hydrocarbons ever found. The Saudis say the field, measuring about 20 miles wide and 175 miles long, spits out as much oil every day as all the oil wells in the U.S. combined. Its output accounts for around 60% of total Saudi production.
Yet no one outside of Saudi Arabia has any sound data on production rates at Ghawar, or the kingdom’s other huge fields. The Saudi Arabian Oil Co., better known as Aramco, has long been secretive about data on the kingdom’s oil holdings, as are most Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries members whose economies are heavily dependent on oil revenue.
“The problem is that silence leads to speculation,” says Neil McMahon, who led the Bernstein study as the firm’s senior analyst. The motivation, he says, “was to confront the whole peak-oil thing with some real data.”
Technorati Tags: Peak Oil
Richard Miniter reports on a “high-level Hudson Institute discussion of the best approach to entering rehab”…
Every time you squeeze the trigger on the gas pump, you are putting money into
the pockets of terrorists.
Trace back the snaking hose, past the pump and the oil refinery, and you will
find nearly two dozen oil kingdoms—all of which, to some degree or another, fund
al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and other jihadi groups.
With the exception of a few mature Western democracies like Canada, Norway and
the United States, writes New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, “the price of
oil and the path of freedom run in opposite directions.”
If the world did not buy their oil, the sheikhs couldn’t give terrorists enough
money for a car to put a car bomb in.
So the key strategic question is: Can we sever the link between oil and al
Qaeda?
Wrestling with the issue in a private room at the Four Seasons Restaurant
recently was former CIA director James Woolsey, former Reagan Administration
Education Secretary Bill Bennett, CNN anchor Lou Dobbs, and Wall Street Journal
editorial writer Stephen Moore. The forum was the Hudson Institute’s Briefing
Series, the best ticket for high-end discussion in New York. The audience is as
interesting as the guests: hedge-fund managers, executives, journalists,
scholars and socialites.
The Saudis account for 1% of planet’s Muslims, but provide 90% of the funding
for Islamic institutions and charities world-wide. In keeping with Saudi
Arabia’s official version of Islam, the kingdom’s billions flow to mosques and
charities that espouse a Wahabi doctrine.
“When the Wahabis teach their doctrine, they are teaching al Qaeda’s doctrine,”
Woolsey said. “There is no substantial difference between al Qaeda’s doctrine
and the Wahabi doctrine.”
[more from 7-10-2007]
Yesterday we drove past a huge mosque complex in Buenos Aires — a reminder of the pervasive influence of The Kingdom’s petrodollars financing the spread of radical islam throughout the world. Then we see this curious statement by King Abdullah [one of the “good guys” in the Saudi leadership]:
King Abdullah caused an uproar ahead of a visit to Britain this week by scolding his hosts about terrorism. But as long as the Saudi monarch has raised the subject, by all means let’s debate the kingdom’s role in promoting radical Islam.
In a BBC interview Monday, King Abdullah said that “most countries are not taking this issue [terrorism] too seriously, including, unfortunately, Great Britain.” The king also claimed, through a translator, that his security services had provided information that could have prevented the July 2005 bombings in London, implying that U.K. authorities chose to ignore it.
The royal musings didn’t go down well, perhaps because Saudi Arabia churns out manpower, money and spiritual inspiration for jihadis around the world. British intelligence service MI5 yesterday refuted the accusations, saying Saudi information was “clearly not relevant to those attacks.” But the Brits might as well press the king further on the subject by asking about Saudi Arabia’s efforts to export its state-sanctioned brand of radical Islam, Wahhabism, to madrassas and mosques around the world.
Britain is one of the biggest targets. Policy Exchange, a think tank, put out a report Monday that Saudi Arabia was the source of much of the extremist material found in British mosques. According to the conclusions of a year-long investigation, that material included calls for the murder of Muslim “apostates” and gays, as well as anti-Western incitement. It was either written by members of the Saudi religious establishment, or distributed by the country’s institutions, or found in Saudi-funded mosques. “The influence of Saudi Arabia is both powerful and malign,” the report concludes.
When Prime Minister Gordon Brown sits down with the 83-year-old monarch today, he can tell him how “seriously” he takes the Saudi connection to Islamic terrorism.
Greg Sheridan is foreign editor for The Australian — very plugged in to the intelligence community. In the following excerpt ASIO is the Australian Security Intelligence OrganizationL
THE Government of Saudi Arabia is continuing to fund extremists within the Australian Muslim community. It does this partly through the Saudi embassy in Canberra. It ought to stop. Saudi Arabia is a theocratic monarchy that recognises no distinction within its rule between politics and religion. It adheres to an extremely conservative and paranoid version of Islam known as Wahabism, which it tries to promote throughout the world.
It also has a history of funding terrorists. It was the chief bankroller of the Palestine Liberation Organisation in the 1970s and ‘80s at the height of the PLO’s involvement in global terror. But it would be true to say that, worldwide, the Saudis tend to fund the precursors to terror rather than terror itself. Since the 9/11 attacks in the US, in which the majority of hijackers were Saudis, the Saudi Government, under intense US pressure, has tried to exercise greater care and control over where Saudi money goes.
The Australian connection is not, however, reassuring. In May 2003 Foreign Minister Alexander Downer visited Riyadh. He saw his ministerial counterpart, Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal. Downer raised his concerns about how much Saudi money was coming into Australia and the uses to which it was being put. This was a complex and difficult conversation for Downer. The Australian system had long had concerns about Saudi funding of extremists in Southeast Asia. But tens of millions of dollars of Saudi money had also come into Australia. In the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s, this was fairly open. The Saudis funded mosques, Islamic schools and various special courses. They promoted Wahabi literature widely. All of this material promoted an extreme version of Islam, but in those pre-9/11 days nobody worried.
After 9/11 ASIO became focused on the Muslim community and the extremists within it. Through its investigations, and through international intelligence sharing, it discovered a good deal about Saudi money coming here. It was not necessarily the obvious thing to do to raise it officially with the Saudis, because this would tip the Saudis off about what Australian agencies knew, and perhaps how they knew it.
Read on…
May 11, 2007: Some details of terrorist operations in Saudi Arabia have been getting out, in the wake of the recent round up of 172 terrorist suspects, and the seizure of weapons, explosives and plans. There were seven different terrorist cells involved in those arrests. One of the cells had a safe house in Syria, where meetings with terrorist groups in Iraq were conducted. The Saudis are not happy with the links between terrorists inside Saudi Arabia, and Iraqi Sunni Arabs. The Saudis have told the Iraqi Sunni Arabs that the Sunni Arab nations in the regions will not bail them out, and that they must make peace with the Shia Arab majority. Many Sunni Arabs, throughout the region, do not agree with this. But they are a small minority. Most Sunni Arabs are appalled at the body count the Sunni Arab terrorists have created in Iraq. While most of the dead are Shia Arabs, a growing number are Sunni Arabs, killed either by the suicide bombers, or by Shia Arab death squads looking for revenge. While most Sunni Arabs would like to see Sunni Arabs running Iraq, there was revulsion at Saddam Husseins methods, and even greater distaste for the subsequent mayhem by his followers.
More on Yemen, and the Iran al Qaeda cooperation…
“Unlike the Americans, we don’t have an exit strategy from Iraq” — Iraqi Vice-President Abd al-Mahdi.
Is this the real American strategy vis Iran? I don’t know, but it makes a lot more sense than the criticism I read every day. Real foreign policy is so much more complex than imagined by the MSM:
But delving beneath the surface of this objective, three strands of a more interesting and hopeful strategy begin to emerge in conversations with Middle Eastern analysts and politicians.
Start with the premise that Washington is indeed being tough on Iran to strengthen the internal opposition to the confrontational policies of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The purpose is not necessarily to trigger the removal of Ahmadinejad, but rather to shatter Tehran’s grandiose delusions of regional hegemony and bring Iran into negotiations from a position of relative weakness, rather than its perceived strength.
Three strands of policy are now being directed to achieving this internal shift in Iranian politics. The first is the US effort to reduce the fighting in Iraq — or failing that, at least to mount a show of strength against the Iranian-backed Shia militias and to remind Tehran that Washington retains its capacity to deploy overwhelming military force.
The second is the US sabre-rattling over Iran’s nuclear program, especially the semi-public threats of Israeli bombing, perhaps even with tactical nuclear weapons. The White House’s announcement that two aircraft carrier battle groups will move to the Gulf within a month or so are clearly a reminder that Washington still has plenty of firepower to attack Iran directly or to back Israeli bombing — and also to protect international oil shipments through the Gulf against Iranian retaliation.
These deployments and public warnings do not necessarily suggest an attack on Iran is likely but rather that the US wants Iran to realise it is playing for very high stakes in its confrontation with the West.
The third strand of Washington’s Iranian policy is less visible, but may well turn out to be more important. The idea is to thwart Iran’s threatened hegemony with an economic pincer movement consisting of financial diplomacy on one side and energy policy on the other.
The main responsibility for this strand of policy rests not with the US or Israel but with the third member of the unlikely new anti-Iranian alliance: Saudi Arabia.
…In a significant statement this month, Saudi Oil Minister Ali al-Naimi opposed Iranian calls for production cuts to halt the decline in oil prices. Naimi’s pronouncement was cast as a technical matter unconnected with politics, but it seemed to confirm private warnings by King Abdullah that his country would try everything to thwart Iran’s hegemony in Iraq and the region, whether by military intervention or more subtle economic means.
This policy was spelt out with surprising precision by senior Saudi security adviser Nawaf Obaid in an article in The Washington Post: “King Abdullah may decide to strangle Iranian funding of the Iraqi militias through oil policy. If Saudi Arabia boosted production and cut the price of oil in half, the kingdom could still finance its current spending. But it would be devastating to Iran, which is facing economic difficulties even with today’s high prices.
“The result would be to limit Tehran’s ability to continue funnelling hundreds of millions a year to the Shia militias in Iraq and elsewhere.”
This article attracted huge attention in the Middle East and Washington, but was hardly noticed in the financial markets and business community.
When the Bush administration came into office, only Egypt and Jordan were functioning allies of the U.S. Iran and Iraq were already declared enemies, Syria was hostile, and even its supposed friends in the Arabian peninsula were so disinclined to help that none did anything to oppose al Qaeda. Some actively helped it, while others knowingly allowed private funds to reach the terrorists whose declared aim was to kill Americans.
The Iraq war has indeed brought into existence a New Middle East, in which Arab Sunnis can no longer gleefully disregard American interests because they need help against the looming threat of Shiite supremacy, while in Iraq at the core of the Arab world, the Shia are allied with the U.S. What past imperial statesmen strove to achieve with much cunning and cynicism, the Bush administration has brought about accidentally. But the result is exactly the same.
Interesting: an analysis by Ed Luttwak, a traditional, realist foreign policy wonk at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Luttwak opines that the US has created a Sunni/Shia balance-of-power or divide-and-rule structure in the Middle East [$], where both sides are coveting US power. He thinks that one consequence may be that the US can pry Syria away from the alliance with Iran.
While I disagree with about half of Luttwak’s points, I think he has a point on the Sunni/Shia competition.
This should be just a sick urban legend. But sadly this really happened at the Jiddah Economic Forum - see Tigerhawk’s analysis:
Al Gore has travelled to the heart of the Wahabbi Muslim world and attacked the United States. One is almost forced to wonder whether he has completely lost his mind.
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