[A-List] [Fwd: [R-G] The death of the mother of all oil fields]

[Macdonald Stainsby <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxx>]

CommonDreams.org	March 7, 2007

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

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@xxxxxxxx) is a lecturer for the
Department of Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Central
Oklahoma.

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--
Macdonald Stainsby
http://independentmedia.ca/survivingcanada
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/rad-green
In the contradiction lies the hope
   --Bertholt Brecht.