Saudi Arabia has large reserves of unconventional gas that could help the kingdom to meet soaring domestic energy needs and leave more crude oil available for export, the head of its national oil company has said.
Khalid Al-Falih, chief executive of Saudi Aramco, told the Financial Times that the kingdom could hold hundreds of trillions of cubic feet of unconventional resources such as shale gas, more than doubling its proved reserves of 280,000bn cubic feet.
The announcement of large unconventional natural gas reserves signal a potential opportunity for Saudi Arabia, but also confirms that Riyadh has not found as much conventional gas as it had hoped.