State oil giant Saudi Aramco expects to have 900 billion barrels of oil resources by 2025, up from the current 790 billion barrels, a company executive said.
Current recoverable crude oil and condensate reserves stand at around 260.2 billion barrels.
"Demand for hydrocarbons will rise despite things happening with oil prices," Jamal AlKhonaifer, development director at Saudi Aramco, told an industry conference in Moscow.
He said 395 billion barrels within the 790 billion barrels figure are probable and possible contingent resources.
"Aramco produces almost 9.5 million barrels a day, and if it needs to replace these reserves it needs to add almost 35 billion barrels of new reserves every 10 years. That's a very large challenge," said Sadad Al-Husseini, a former top executive at Saudi Aramco.
According to a 2007 US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks, Abdallah Al-Saif, who was at the time Aramco's senior vice president for exploration and production, had said that Aramco has 716 billion barrels of total crude reserves, of which 51 percent are recoverable.
He also said that in 20 years, Aramco will have over 900 billion barrels of total reserves and future technology will allow for 70 per cent recovery.
Aramco's CEO Khalid Al-Falih said in January the company is "targeting to increase average recovery rates from our oil reservoirs by 20 percent which could add 160 billion barrels of additional reserves. That's more than the current reserves of the United States, Russia, China, the UK and Brazil combined."
Khonaifer also said the company is currently pumping 9.7 million to 9.8 million barrels per day (bpd) and plans for next year's oil production depends on demand.
"We do not care about the oil prices, we don't play with them. We even don't have our own benchmark. Of course we are not interested in too high and too low prices," he said, adding that the Opec heavyweight can easily adjust its production according to demand given its significant spare capacity.
Saudi Arabia has an output capacity of 12.5 million bpd.
Opec meets on November 27 in Vienna to decide on output policy amid calls by some members to cut output to support prices.
Reuters
20 November
