Seriously, fuck Saudi Arabia

Oil & Gas Journal wrote:
Saudi supergiant Shaybah oil field still growing
04/05/2004

Shaybah oil field, Saudi Arabia's newest supergiant, is approaching its sixth anniversary yet still is growing in terms of reserves and potential productive capacity.

Although the official reserves estimate for Shaybah is 14 billion bbl, project managers with operator and state oil company Saudi Aramco contend that their efforts have proved up as much as 15.7 billion bbl. One project engineer confided to OGJ his conviction that the number could easily climb to 18 billion bbl, given the company's recent successes with appraisal drilling and more-detailed 3D seismic surveys. And the field is proving prolific even in other ways, as Aramco last month reported a new gas pool discovery in the heart of the field (see related story, this page).

Shaybah, in the Rub' al Khali basin at the eastern edge of Saudi Arabia's vast Empty Quarter deep-desert region, currently produces about 560,000 b/d of oil. That's down 30,000 b/d from what it had produced most of the time since start-up in July 1998—a cut ordered to accommodate the new Saudi production quota implemented under an Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries agreement early this year. Scheduled field maintenance is expected to reduce output further to 450,000 b/d during April-June.

But even those levels are is just a fraction of the field's production potential. Both the Shaybah engineers and Saudi Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali al-Naimi told OGJ that a ramp-up to 1 million b/d is feasible for the field.

"Should the demand [for the added increment of production] materialize—Shaybah is, I think, depleted at the rate of 1%[/year], which is low—with reserves of over 14 billion bbl, another increment of 500,000 [b/d] is feasible," Al-Naimi told OGJ in an interview in Riyadh (see related story, p. 18). "It's not a big deal."

Shaybah produced its 1 billionth bbl of oil on Dec. 25, 2003; by that time, another 2.5 billion bbl had been added to the reserves column from further field delineation and development.

Ben_Reilly wrote:But it's still about oil (economics) rather than ideology, which sort of proves what I was driving at. If N. Korea had vast oil reserves, I'm sure we in the West would be great friends with Kim Il Whatever His Name Is Manchild Asshole. The supposed "clash of civilisations" is nothing compared to "We Want The Stuff."

Original Quill wrote:

Ben_Reilly wrote:But it's still about oil (economics) rather than ideology, which sort of proves what I was driving at. If N. Korea had vast oil reserves, I'm sure we in the West would be great friends with Kim Il Whatever His Name Is Manchild Asshole. The supposed "clash of civilisations" is nothing compared to "We Want The Stuff."

Energy counts for a lot.  Certainly one of the basic food groups...lol.

The way the CIA originally excused themselves with these countries was to say, it's a different culture, and it would be ethnocentric of us to judge.  Now that the world has gotten smaller--don't underestimate that factor--that perspective doesn't fly.  I think that's a lot of the problem, don't you?  I mean, the Arab Spring and the new awakening of the people at least in the urban centers of the Middle East, can be attributed to the dynamic of the shrinking world.  And moral questions such as the one you are posing, happen to come along during changing conditions.

News of a divorce rarely comes as a surprise to anyone these days. This particular one, however, has raised some eyebrows for being perhaps the shortest marriage ever. In Saudi Arabia, a groom asked for a divorce while his new wife was still in her wedding dress – nearly right after exchanging vows.

The bride and groom were from a town called Medinah and had never met in person – which is not uncommon for people marrying in the Middle East. In Saudi customs, a man and woman are permitted to look at each other only once before the wedding, however this particular couple passed up the first glance.

The wedding had taken place without issue – the trouble began when the couple had to pose for the photographer. That was when the bride removed her veil to smile for the celebratory post-wedding pictures. When the groom saw his bride’s face for the first time, he immediately reacted in disgust.

He reportedly turned to his bride and said:

“You are not the girl I want to marry. You are not the one I had imagined. I am sorry, but I divorce you.”