"In the Arabian Gulf we have serious problems of maturity in many of these fields" Sadad al Husseini, ASPO USA interview, Denver CO, 12 October 2009

Steve Andrews, co-founder of ASPO USA travelled to London (on his own time and dime) to interview Sadad al-Husseini. The interview has been shown as a series of clips at the ASPO International conference in Denver this week. Sadad al-Husseini is a geologist and reservoir engineer who worked for Saudi Aramco reaching the position of vice president.

Exerpts from the interview are available on the ASPO USA web site. The single quote above was the comment that caught my attention the most.

The comment is particularly interesting in the context of how OECD governments are planning their energy futures based on IEA forecasts such as this:

Ramping Saudi production linearly to 15.6 million barrels per day by 2030 has this outcome on a Hubbert linearisation. The absence of any peak points to near-infinite reserves - in a country where there are serious issues of maturity in the reservoirs.

[Note the chart is lifted from another post discussing UK government energy strategy which for various reasons I decided not to post.]