Saudi Arabian Oil Co., the world's biggest state oil company, has 260 billion barrels of oil reserves, said Muhammad Al-Qahtani, the executive director of the company's Petroleum Engineering & Development unit. “To ensure availability and reliability, we have invested heavily in new developments to increase oil production capacity,” Al-Qahtani said at a conference in Beijing on Tuesday. “A lack of resources isn't a constraining factor.” The Kingdom had proved reserves of 264.1 billion barrels at the end of 2008, according to BP Plc's Statistical Review of World Energy. Saudi Aramco aims to increase natural gas output to 15.5 billion cubic feet a day by 2014 from the current 11.2 billion cubic feet a day, Al-Qahtani said. Meanwhile, China's annual natural gas consumption by 2020 would be more than doubled to 300 billion cubic meters, said Zhou Jiping, president of PetroChina, on Tuesday at an industrial conference. He said China's natural gas consumption in 2009 reached 88.7 billion cubic meters. By the end of 2009, PetroChina owns proven gas reserves of 1.79 trillion cubic meters and its overseas equity gas production was 5.5 billion cubic meters. PetroChina also imports natural gas from Turkmenistan from Central Asia natural gas pipeline and until April 27 the pipeline had pumped 1 billion cubic meters of gas to China. CNPC, the parent company of PetroChina, forecasted earlier that the pipeline this year would supply China with 5.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
