The CEO of Saudi Aramco, Amin Al-Nasser, said that the company has plans to increase gas production by 50% to 60% by 2030, during his speech at a session at the Eighth International OPEC Conference in the Austrian capital Vienna today, Wednesday.
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has one of the largest gas reserves in the world, and these reserves were rarely exploited in the past. However, the demand for gas has recovered recently, especially after Russia invaded Ukraine and cut off supplies to Europe in response to Western sanctions, which contributed to increasing the demand for gas and boosted its extraction plans.
Much of the additional gas production in Saudi Arabia will come from the Jafurah field, which is considered one of the largest untapped fields in the world. Nasser said earlier that Aramco aims to invest tens of billions of dollars in developing the field, and in this regard has begun talks with investors in upstream and downstream projects, such as pipeline projects.
The Jafurah field is the largest in Saudi Arabia for unconventional gas, in terms of volume and area, as it is 170 km long and 100 km wide. The gas reserve in the field is more than 200 trillion standard cubic feet of wet raw gas, which contains ethane, gas liquids and condensates. It is expected that natural gas production from Al-Jafurah will start at the end of 2024, and that production will reach two billion standard cubic feet per day of sales gas when the field development is completed.
In his speech today, Al-Nasser indicated that the demand for oil will continue for years, saying that demand from China has increased by 3 million barrels per day so far, and demand from India has increased by one million barrels per day.
