much smaller, but it is going to be far more difficult to exploit Khurais has no pressure of its own To extract any oil from it, the Saudis will have to pump a massive amount of seawater from the Persian Gulf, which is 120 miles from Khurais Injecting the water involves an extraordinary complex of pipes, filters, and more than 100 injection wells for the seawater The whole project will cost a total of $15 billion The Saudis told The Wall Street Journal that the development of the Khurais complex is the biggest industrial project underway in the world The Saudis have used seismic technology to take more than 2.8 million 3-dimensional pictures of the deposit, trying to gain as complete an understanding of what lies beneath the surface as possible The massive injection of seawater is risky Done incorrectly, the introduction of the seawater could make the oil unusable Khurais illustrates a fundamental problem that the world faces as it contemplates its energy future The field requires massive investment for an extraordinarily uncertain outcome, one that will only increase Saudi capacity from about 11.3 million barrels per day to 12.5 Sadad al-Husseini, who until 2004 was the second in command at Aramco and is now a private energy consultant, doubts that Saudi Arabia will be able to achieve even that increase in output He says that is true of the world in general, that the globe has already reached the maximum production it will ever achieve—the so-called “peak production” theory What we face, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2008, is a grim future of depleting oil resources and rising prices Rising oil prices, of course, lead to greater conservation efforts, and the economic slump that took hold in the latter part of 2008 has led to a sharp reversal in oil prices But, if “peak production” theory is valid, lower oil Attributed to Libby Rittenberg and Timothy Tregarthen Saylor URL: http://www.saylor.org/books/ Saylor.org 724