Saudi Arabia was unlikely to need to boost its crude production capacity beyond 12.5 million barrels per day (bpd) until 2020, the Kingdom's oil minister said in remarks published on Thursday. “We are very comfortable now and I believe we will be comfortable until 2020... that is just my gut feeling,” Ali Al-Naimi said in the second part of an interview published by consultancy Petroleum Policy Intelligence. The Kingdom would stick to its long-held policy to keep spare capacity at 1.5 million bpd to 2 million bpd, and would review what it needed to do to maintain that margin each year, he said. Demand for Saudi crude would probably reach 10 million bpd in 2015, Naimi said, up from output now of around 8.1 million bpd. But the Kingdom may never need to pump at 12.5 million bpd if all the measures being pursued worldwide on efficiency, renewables and electric cars materialize, he added. The Kingdom has earmarked $20 billion to $30 billion over the next five years just to maintain capacity at 12.5 million bpd, he said. It would look at new upstream oil projects to maintain capacity from 2012 onward, Naimi said. The only current large-scale project is the 900,000 bpd Moneefa project, due for start up in 2013 and completion in 2015. The project has a near $16 billion price tag. The Kingdom has outlined plans to boost capacity to as much as 15 million bpd from other fields, and said it would embark on that expansion when global demand warranted. Saudi Arabia's decision to relocate a joint petrochemical project between Aramco and US Dow Chemical to Jubail from Ras Tanura had saved billions of dollars, Naimi said. The new location would benefit from infrastructure already in place there, and synergies with an existing refinery at Jubail and a new one under construction, he added. The petrochemical project, which would have represented the biggest foreign investment in the Saudi energy sector, had a price tag of around $22 billion. Saudi Aramco planned to go ahead with construction of a new 400,000 bpd Yanbu refinery on its Red Sea Coast, despite partner ConocoPhillips withdrawal from the project, Naimi said. “No question,” he said. “We can do it on our own.” The internal rate of return on the project was around 16 percent, Naimi said, up from around 7-9 percent before the contracts were rebid. Another refinery to be built by Aramco, the Jizan plant, would be completed by 2014, Naimi said. Saudi Arabia planned to encourage increased energy efficiency to help deal with strong domestic demand growth, the minister said. It would consider boosting the domestic price of gas to cover production costs and a profit if it needed to, Naimi said. The transfer price of gas in the Kingdom is 75 cents per million BTU (British Thermal Unit), a fraction of the cost on international markets. Still, there was no reason to charge at international prices, so long as the Kingdom recovered costs and received a margin, he said. Lower prices would allow the Kingdom to benefit from its large gas reserves, the world's fifth largest. “We may look at increasing our current (gas) price to a reasonable one,” Naimi said. “The whole point is to sell gas with a reasonable margin cost, reasonable profit and let people benefit from the endowment we have.” Saudi Arabia planned to boost the capacity of its gas system to 15.5 billion cubic feet per day (cfd) in 2015 from around 10 billion cfd, he added.
