Oh, yeah, I know damn good and well what they say. You might want to consider what happened to their URR estimate soon after they nationalized. Combine that with their haggling tendencies at the souk and you're going to get a helluva' lot better idea of what's really going on than the Frickinpedia.
Since you're not really oil patch savvy, review oil pricing dynamics and history here (it's a good, short essay):
http://www.wtrg.com/prices.htm
Notice that the Saudis don't actually like the price to get too high because it makes it profitable enough for oil companies to explore and install production equipment elsewhere, which is dangerous for their partial monopoly as a swing producer.
However, Peak Oil isn't as much about running out of the stuff as it is about the geological physics of REMOVING it and the resultant production curve that you get from doing just that. And it IS the simple physics of flowing the oil through the porous rock strata that it's in as it relates to the pressure that it's under. You can think of it rather like a deflating tire--the lower the pressure gets, the slower the air goes out the valve stem. In short, the actual massflow follows a decline with respect to time.
Sure, we've got creative ways of trying to enhance production like pumping separated saltwater brine and natural gases back into a field's wells to help keep the pressure from dropping too much. But that takes energy and the older a field gets, the more it takes. It can take
a lot.
And in a lot of fields, you also start getting an increasing fraction of saltwater up with your oil. I was out on an offshore platform (GOM) to support commissioning for the production equipment for a newly-drilled subsea well for Spinnaker/Shell. It cost the better part of $100,000,000 to drill that well. When tested, they felt like it was going to do ~15,000 bbl/day. Within two months it was about 50% water and a few months after that nearly 90%. It never paid for itself by a long shot, and that doesn't even include the work that they did on the well later, trying to boost production. There are quite a few like that.
I was also offshore for Schlumberger (1996, btw) in Nigeria (~40 miles out of Port Harcourt) on a jack-up rig for commissioning the entire thing. The platform was assembled near Houston and took a $1,000,000/day boat ride to Nigeria. Last I heard (~2002), the entire field was petering out rapidly at over 50% brine. We're talking a bunch of wells in that case and they had a high pourpoint besides (paraffin).
These are in no way isolated incidents--the oil patch is chock full of cases like this and it's getting worse. If you think oil is so damn plentiful and cheap to produce, then just what the hell do you think Petrobras is doing off the coast of Brazil, contracting ~80% of the world's total of ~12 deep-water rigs that can handle 20,000 feet of drill pipe in 6,000 feet of water? All for somewhere between 10 and 30 billion barrels of oil (the high estimate is about enough to power the entire world's consumption for only one year, and they rarely make the high estimates). That, my friend, is considered a "major find" these days and that is going to be some very expensive oil to produce, both in capex and opex.
Oh, sure... the oil companies are just rakin' it in and rapin' your @$$, laughing all the way to the bank while the incredible economic damage they're doing is reducing the relative value of their horde faster than they can bring it in.
Yeah, right.
Pidgey
