Oman: extraction specialists

THE PACE of Oman's oil production decline has increased in inverse proportion to the country's natural gas expansion. Petroleum Development Oman (PDO), which operates 90% of Omani oil output, has seen production tumble from more than 1m barrels a day (b/d) in the late 1990s to just 0.7m b/d in 2003. It is likely to fall by a further 50,000 b/d in 2004, as maturing fields and complex geology combine to make the extraction of oil by conventional means a more arduous task. Necessity has proved the mother of invention in Oman's case. PDO has hopes of stemming the long-term decline in crude production with its new range of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) techniques, which it expects to account for a