MEDIA TOUR: Workers look at journalists during a media tour of the Khurais oilfield, located between Riyadh and Dhahran, on Monday. (AP)

KHURAIS OILFIELD: Saudi Aramco has assured that it would fulfill its commitment to raise oil capacity by 1.2 million barrels per day (bpd) by June 2009 through the new Khurais oilfield.

“This is the biggest new field in our plan to raise oil capacity and we are on schedule,” Amin Nasser, Saudi Aramco’s senior vice president for exploration and production, told a large group of national and international journalists at the Khurais project site.

“The Khurais project, 160 km south of Riyadh and 250 km southwest of Dhahran, will surely avoid the delays that have plagued the global energy sector,” said Nasser who was accompanied by Saudi Aramco’s other senior executives including Dr. Muhammad M. Al-Saggaf, manager, EXPEC Advanced Research Center, Khalid Abdulqader, manager of Khurais program, Mohammed Al-Rabeh, manager of Khurais Central Processing Facilities (KCPF), and Fahad A. Ajmi, general supervisor of the project’s reservoir management.

The journalists were flown in a charter plane to the $10 billion Khurais project on Monday, the day the Council of Ministers commended the Jeddah Energy Meeting’s positive outcome in terms of discussing future plans to stabilize the international oil market. The meeting of oil consumers and producers, opened by Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah on Sunday, in the presence of British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and some overseas ministerial delegations including those headed by US Energy Secretary Sam Bodman and Indian Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, made new proposals to meet global economic challenges in the wake of rising oil prices.

Saudi Aramco’s assurance came a day after Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources Ali Al-Naimi told the summit that the Kingdom would pump enough oil to meet demand and pledged to add to existing plans to increase output potential.

“We are 100 percent confident that Khurais will come on stream as planned in June 2009,” Al-Nasser said, adding that a major boost to capacity will also come from Khursaniyah oilfield from August, a few months after its set deadline. “Even with a slight delay, it took 41 months from start to finish compared to the world average of 53 months, still Khursaniyah is doing very well,” he said.

The Khurais project site presents a scene of steel girders, storage tanks and pipelines that are being constructed by about 28,000 workers.

The giant processing plant will handle oil from the Abu Jifan and Mazalij fields, as well as Khurais. Together the fields will produce more oil than each of the three smallest members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries: Indonesia, Qatar and Ecuador.

The oil the Saudi fields contain is highly prized Arab Light oil, which is easily converted into transport fuel.

The new fields are near the world’s largest oilfield at Ghawar, which has produced for around half a century.