Riyadh – Mubasher: Saudi Arabian Oil Co, known internationally as Saudi Aramco, plans to invest more than $300 billion in the coming ten years, president and CEO Amin Nasser said on Monday.
These investments will be used to maintain Aramco’s spare oil output capacity, implement a large programme focused on “conventional and unconventional” gas sources, and ensure global energy security, Nasser added at the World Petroleum Congress in Istanbul, Turkey.
Aramco’s top official said in a statement that the growing belief that the world “can prematurely disengage from proven, reliable energy sources like oil and gas” based on the assumption that “alternatives will rapidly deploy” was incorrect.
He expounded by saying that “about $1 trillion in investments [have] been lost in the current downturn, concurrent to growing oil demand and the natural decline of developed fields.”
He added that the estimated amount that the largest oil company in the world needs to produce, to counter these effects, is about 20 million additional barrels per day (bpd) over the coming five years.
“The volume of conventional oil discovered around the world halved over the past four years, compared to the previous four,” Aramco said in a statement, citing its CEO Amin Nasser, who noted that this drop in global oil discoveries led to “an investment”.
“We aim to double our natural gas production to 23 billion standard cubic feet per day (scf/d) over the coming decade, and raise the share of gas in the Kingdom’s utilities to about 70%, the highest of any G20 nation,” Nasser said.
Despite the drop in oil prices and the weakness in international market growth, Aramco has produced an impressive record of 10.5 million bpd in 2016, the statement showed.
