State-owned Saudi Aramco has awarded two American reserves auditors the contracts to review its massive oil deposits. Gaffney, Cline and Associates (a subsidiary of Baker Hughes) and DeGolyer and MacNaughton to perform the work. Aramco has long reported its fields contain about 15% of the world’s total supply of oil, or an estimated 265 billion barrels in-place. Its executives are rumoured to want its initial public offering (IPO) to be the world’s biggest.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman announced in 2016 he “expected the IPO would value Aramco at a minimum of $2 trillion (U.S.)” but that he hoped the final figure would actually be higher. The markets anticipate the IPO will happen sometime in 2018 and has yet to confirm a stock exchange, although the company has been considering North American, European and Asian exchanges and is expected to arrange several “discovery trips” to meet the leadership teams who run the international trading desks.
Meanwhile, Amin Nasser, Aramco’s CEO, says the world will have to invest $25 trillion in upstream production, during the next 25 years, to satisfy rising demand. “Any shortfall in investment will lead to a tightening of the market and will cause price spikes,” he adds and dismissed the notions that in the next two-and-a-half decades’ renewable energy would assume a dominant role.
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