Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said that Saudi Aramco has discovered new natural gas fields in four different regions across the Kingdom, according to information published by the Saudi Press Agency.
The fields were discovered “in the central area of the kingdom, in the Empty Quarter desert, near its northern border and in the eastern region,” Reuters reports, citing the SPA.
The five fields were described as follows:
- Shadoon, in the central region southeast of Riyadh, producing 27 million cubic feet of gas per day with 3,300 barrels of condensate
- Shehab, in the empty quarter, with 31 million cubic feet per day of gas
- Shorfa, in the empty quarter, with 16.9 million cubic feet per day
- Umm Khansir, with 2 million cubic feet per day of unconventional natural gas
- Samna, with three different wells totaling 26.7 million cubic feet per day of unconventional natural gas
In total, the fields can produce over 100 million cubic feet per day, Saudi Arabia said. While that would amount to a marginal increase in the total produced daily by Saudi Arabia (roughly 11 billion cubic feet per day as of 2020), increasingly, Saudi Arabia both producing and consuming more natural gas and less oil.
Natural gas supplies and processing capacity has risen since 2015, according to the U.S. EIA, but oil production has declined during this period, which has allowed natural gas to replace a significant portion of crude oil burned for power generation.
Saudi Arabia has been capturing and using gas as a way to generate additional value streams beyond crude oil since the mid-1970s, its state-owned energy company Saudi Aramco notes. But as of 2000, Saudi Arabia produced no gas from non-associated gas fields, the EIA notes, so it is new investments in new gas fields since then that has allowed the Kingdom’s natural gas production to soar.
Natural gas produced from non-associated gas fields in Saudi Arabia increased from nothing in 2000 to 46% of total production in 2020. In 2016, Saudi Aramco, the national oil company, began to prioritize the development of non-associated gas fields, located mostly offshore.
Saudi Arabia’s growth in the sector has made it the sole supplier of natural gas to Saudi Arabia, the seventh largest natural gas market in the world. The Kingdom does not import or export natural gas.
