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Saudi Arabia eyes total dominance in oil and gas

By Julieanne Geiger - posted Friday, 3 July 2020

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But Saudi Arabia expects to be the largest hydrocarbon producer "still" in 2050. If they are not so now, what are the chances they will be so thirty years from now?

Perhaps out of step with Saudi Arabia's grand Vision 2030 plan, The Kingdom is still hoping to be top dog for petroleum production decades from now.

The EIA, in its Annual Energy Outlook 2020, has forecast that global production of crude oil and lease condensate, natural gas plant liquids, dry natural gas, and coal in the United States will reach 90.29 quadrillion Btus in its reference case. For crude oil and lease condensate, the EIA expects that the United States will be on par with where it is today, in its reference case. For natural gas plant liquids production, the EIA anticipates an increase by 2050.

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Source: EIA Annual Energy Outlook 2020

The reason for the EIA assuming oil production will level off in 2022 and holding fairly steady through 2045 is the anticipated decline in well productivity, forcing tight oil producers to hunt for oil is less prolific areas.

For Saudi Arabia, its 30-year hydrocarbon plan or abilities are more of an unknown. It has the world's second-largest crude oil reserves, and it does have plans to add natural gas production in the coming years as it looks to step away from its near-total reliance on crude oil.

For natural gas, Saudi Arabia announced earlier this year that it may actually bring forward its plans to export natural gas by 2030. It did not, however, provide details about this plan, or how it would be implemented.

But its detail less plans may run into some trouble. For starters, while Saudi Arabia has an excess of low-cost associated gas reserves that it could tap, the production of said gas would be limited to the amount of crude it can produce. And crude oil production is periodically--and profoundly so right now--capped by OPEC agreements that keep the Kingdom's fossil fuel ambitions in check.

But the EIA sees the OPEC countries besting non-OPEC countries on the production front by 2050

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