KSA ‘lifted oil output to 10m bpd in July’

JEDDAH: Saudi Arabia produced around 10 million barrels per day (bpd) of oil in July, up from 9.6 million bpd in June, an industry source told Reuters.
Saudi Arabia supplied a total of 9.99 million bpd to the domestic and export markets, the report quoted him as saying.
When Saudi output is higher than supply, the difference typically goes into storage.
Saudi Arabia supplied around 9.6 million bpd to the market in May and 9.3 million bpd in April.
Output usually rises in the summer to fuel domestic power stations needed to meet surging electricity demand.
After pumping many Saudi fields at near record rates to make up for lost supplies from Libya and Iran over the last two years, the Kingdom is looking to raise output at less productive fields to take the pressure off more mature reservoirs, including the giant Ghawar.
Two industry sources told Reuters last month that Saudi Aramco plans to increase capacity at two oilfields by a total of 550,000 barrels per day by 2017 to take strain off the world’s largest conventional oilfield.
“The targeted area includes the two fields south of Khurais, Abu Jiffan and Mazalij, which are smaller complex fields that have not produced much oil in past years,” Sadad Al-Husseini, a former top executive at Saudi Aramco, said.
“As for Shaybah field, they want to mainly raise production from the south where the reservoir is less productive and to gather large volumes of additional natural gas liquids which are recovered from the associated gas.”
Saudi Aramco plans to boost capacity at Khurais by 300,000 bpd to 1.5 million bpd, while raising capacity at Shaybah from 750,000 bpd to 1 million bpd by 2017, two sources familiar with the plans said.
Earlier media reports have said that Aramco was planning to add more drilling rigs than expected this year and hire more in 2014 as new fields are drilled to counter dwindling output from aging deposits.
Saudi Aramco, will use a record 170 rigs by the end of 2013, according to estimates from Schlumberger and Halliburton. That exceeds the total number forecast by the oil-service companies earlier this year, Bloomberg reported.
The expansion in rigs reflects the increasing difficulty of extracting crude from mature fields.
According to Bloomberg, Schlumberger CEO Paal Kibsgaard said last month that Aramco will use 170 rigs by end of this year or early 2014.