Oil wells dry up as depletion hit South Sudan – gov’t  

JUBA – South Sudan government has said that oil reserves in some producing blocks are declining with senior government officials saying that blocks 1, 2, 3, 4, 7 have reached their peaks, which means the oil coming from these blocks has dramatically decreased.

“The reserves in South Sudan are also declining,” the undersecretary in the ministry of petroleum Awow Daniel Chuang said during the oil and power conference last week, according to Eye Radio.

“We know that blocks 1, 2, and 4 and blocks 3 and 7 have already reached their peaks and they are already in decline,” the senior government official who was once a minister of petroleum said.

Oil depletion is the decline in oil production of a well, oil field, or geographic area.

The United States Energy Information Administration predicted in 2006 that world consumption of oil will increase to 98.3 million barrels per day (15,630,000 m3/d) (mbd) in 2015 and 118 million barrels per day in 2030.

South Sudan government has recently resumed production in Unity state’s Tharjiath Block 5A injecting 3,000 barrels per day into existing numbers of barrels from other oilfields across the country.

It could reach 8,000 or 10,000 barrels per day by the end of the year, according to the petroleum ministry.

“But still we have a lot of opportunities that we can tap from this because initially, the discovered oil in these places was very huge, but the recovery factors are very poor,” Awow further added.