No great shortage of the stuff it seems.
Manama, Bahrain, Apr 4 – Bahrain on
Wednesday announced its newly discovered shale oil reserve was estimated to contain more than 80 billion barrels, making the once-marginal oil producer potentially a major player in the market.
The amount of recoverable oil — or oil that can be extracted — is still under study, Oil Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Khalifa Al-Khalifa told a press conference in Manama.
The field covers 2,000 square kilometres (772 square miles) in shallow waters off the kingdom’s west coast, which faces oil giant Saudi Arabia.
The new field would in theory dwarf the Bahrain Field, the country’s only other oil field, which contains several hundred million barrels.
The actual impact of the discovery is contingent on how much of it is actually extractable. Yahya al-Ansari, exploration manager at Bahrain’s national oil company Bapco, said that pumping of oil from the field is not expected for at least five years.
International consultants DeGolyer and MacNaughton, Halliburton, and Schlumberger are heading the project with Bahrain’s National Oil and Gas Authority.
Bahrain, which sits between regional arch-rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran, was the first Gulf state to discover crude but is today the smallest producer among the six oil-rich states of the Gulf.
The tiny Sunni-ruled kingdom currently produces some 50,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the Bahrain Field, discovered in 1932.
Manama also gets another 150,000 barrels daily from the Abu Saafa offshore field, which it splits equally with Saudi Arabia.
The kingdom has also discovered natural gas estimated at between 10 trillion cubic feet and 20 trillion cubic feet, Sheikh Mohammed said.
Bahrain, which is not a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), is nonetheless part of an agreement between OPEC and non-OPEC members to cut oil production in the wake of the 2014 market crash.
The six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries together pump around 17 million barrels of oil per day, equivalent to some 18 percent of global production or 55 percent of OPEC’s output.
To help cope with the drop in oil revenues following the collapse in crude prices, slashed by half since mid-2014, the GCC states decided to impose a value-added tax of five percent from
SOME PERSPECTIVE here.
Analysts: New Find Won't Yield 'Significant Economic Windfall' for Bahrain
by Andreas Exarheas
|
Rigzone Staff
|
Thursday, April 19, 2018
Oil and gas analysts at BMI Research do not expect Bahrain's recent discovery of a large oil and gas field to yield a 'significant economic windfall' for the country.
Oil and gas analysts at BMI Research do not expect Bahrain’s recent discovery of a large oil and gas field to yield a “significant economic windfall” for the country.
“Extraction will be fraught with technical difficulties, pushing up operating costs at the field, such that the government will have to provide generous contract terms to partner companies,” the analysts said in a brief research note sent to Rigzone.
“We believe this will limit prospects for a significant boost to the country’s fiscal revenues and balance of payments dynamics. As such, we maintain our view that Bahrain will continue to face significant economic headwinds,” the analysts added.
BMI, which highlighted that typical onshore reserves in the Middle East have an extraction cost of around $10 per barrel, said the extraction cost for the newfound resources is likely to run close to between $75 and 80 per barrel.
“This leaves little room for the major oil companies to profit in the current low oil price environment,” the analysts said.
“These slim margins will likely put severe constraints on the scale of the extraction unless oil prices gain greater momentum,” they added.
Bahrain’s
new discovery is estimated to contain at least 80 billion barrels of tight oil, which is the kingdom's biggest ever find, according to the country’s oil minister.
TPA
(20min delay)