MUSCAT, 31 March 2004 — Oman expects to boost its declining oil production by 50,000 barrels per day (bpd) in 2005 through new discoveries and state-of-the-art drilling technology, Oil Ministry officials told the state ONA news agency yesterday.
Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), the sultanate’s leading oil company, has allocated $2 billion for new technology over the next five years, ONA said.
PDO, which produces almost 90 percent of Oman’s total crude output, said its output fell to 703,000 bpd last year from 771,000 bpd in 2002 “due to ageing oilfields,” according to ONA. Although the Gulf state’s oil production is expected to drop five percent this year, the government is already working to correct the shortfall, ONA said. Oman, a non-OPEC crude producer with current output of around 710,000 barrels per day (bpd), has been battling to halt a drop in daily output.
Earlier this month, PDO announced it had begun producing oil from the southern Zalzala field, the company’s first multi-well field to come on stream in the past four years.
PDO has also intensified its efforts in other areas of its concessions in the north and central of Oman. Other technologies, including water injection and flooding, are expected to recover a large amount of oil.
Other producers, including Occidental of the USA, France’s Total and local company Petro Gas, are also busy exploring to increase oil production.
The site in the Harweel cluster is producing oil and gas from a depth of some five kilometers (three miles), making it PDO’s deepest producing oil field in reservoir rocks more than half a billion years old.
Production from the cluster, 80 kilometers (50 miles) south of Marmul, is set to increase gradually over the first half of the year as three more fields — Ghafeer, Sakhiya and Dafaq — are brought on stream. The sultanate also has proven gas reserves of around 660 million cubic meters (22 trillion cubic feet), with potential reserves more than double that figure. PDO is 60 percent owned by the government, 34 percent by Royal Dutch Shell, four percent by Total and two percent by Partex.
— Additional input from agencies
