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Saudi state oil giant Aramco is shifting its exploration and production focus to gas to meet rapidly rising domestic demand as its programme to expand oil capacity comes to a close. Falling global oil consumption has left the kingdom sitting on its biggest supply cushion in years and allowed it to shift attention from oil to booming gas demand at home.
"There will be more gas developments," a senior source at Aramco told Reuters. "We are expanding gas activity and we are slowing down oil."
Saudi gas demand has risen with an economic boom financed by record crude export revenues as the oil price rallied from 2002 to 2008. Economic momentum continues, despite lower oil prices, as the kingdom presses ahead with projects to diversify away from dependence on crude sales revenue. "Gas is a high priority as it is used to fire power plants, to desalinate water and as a feedstock for petrochemicals," said Sadad al-Husseini, a former top executive at Aramco. Annual gas demand in the world's top oil exporter is growing at 7 percent per year. Demand was around 7.5 billion cubic feet per day (cfd) last year, estimated Siamak Adibi, senior Middle East consultant for FACTS Global Energy.
Aramco has accelerated the development of pure gas, or gas from fields not associated with oil. It plans to boost capacity to process that gas to 9 billion cfd by 2015, up from around 6.2 billion cfd now. Aramco was considering programmes for rapid development of pure gas at the Arabiyah and Hisbah fields. It began drilling at Karan last year, its first offshore pure gas project.

Copyright Reuters, 2009

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