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THE RESERVES CHALLENGEMAJOR GAS DISCOVERIES IN 2006 (in millions of cubic feet per day)Well Gas flow Condensate Location Depth FieldKaran-6 80 Offshore 10,888 feet KaranZimlah-1 10 660 bpd 352 km S Dhahran 14,250 feet ZimlahKassab-1 10 220 km S Riyadh 15,750 feet KassabNujayman-1 60 2,040 bpd 280 km S Riyadh 15,000 feet NujaymanSaudi Aramco geoscientists have developed a series ofinnovative technologies to estimate and subsequentlyremove unwanted multiple reflections from seismicdata, which mask primary events indicative of oil andgas reservoirs. These technologies have considerablyreduced the risk associated with wildcat anddevelopmental drilling and are expected to play a keyrole in processing seismic data from the Red Sea.We are also conducting extensive integrated geologicaland simulation studies to optimize the new incrementsin Khurais, AFK (Abu Hadriyah, Fadhili and Khursaniyah),Manifa, Shaybah and Nuayyim.The petroleum industry is witnessing tremendousadvances in a wide range of technologies, including themassive computing power that supports numerousupstream applications. For example, the computingcapacity at Saudi Aramco’s Exploration and PetroleumEngineering Center (EXPEC) has reached 34 teraflops,or 34 trillion floating point operations per second. Thisrepresents a 300-fold increase in computing capacitysince 1999, and indicates the exponential rate ofdevelopment of upstream technology as a whole.The seismic processing environment in our EXPECComputer Center (ECC) continues to grow. In 2006,we completed the largest disk installation and seismicdata migration in the center’s history. A total of650 terabytes of new storage was installed forconventional seismic processing. Additional computercapacity was achieved through new and faster HighPerformance Computing clusters based on commodityPC hardware. The new seismic processing environmenthas increased computing capacity by 47 percent andstorage by 46 percent.Our expanding computing capacity is helping us keepahead of the curve in the crucial search for andcharacterization of new reserves.Our own POWERS simulator employs refined multimillioncell models to optimize development of multilateralmaximum reservoir contact (MRC) wells, equipped with“Intelligent Well” completions. Powerful parallelprocessors enable us to reduce computational time froma few days to a few hours.The ECC designed and opened the Event SolutionCenter, a state-of-the-art approach to reservoir studieswherein the collective skills of multi-disciplinary expertsare focused on detailed uncertainty analyses and riskassessment processes. This approach, which compressesmajor decision cycles, reduces uncertainty and providesa wider range of alternatives, has yielded success in theSafaniyah and Manifa fields and is being applied in North'Uthmaniyah. Completion time for studies has beenreduced from one to two years to one to three months.Given the scope of our operations, it is no surprise thatwe have more than 4 million engineering drawingsrepresenting the logical and physical design of ourfacilities. Engineers use these drawings in performingdaily operations at the plants, and quick access to accuratedrawings is especially critical in responding toemergencies. We have embarked on a corporatewideeffort to implement "intelligent engineeringdrawings," transforming our file-based graphical datainto information stored in databases. This approach wasadopted during the detailed design work on the AFKproject, and will be deployed on the Khurais programand the expansion projects at Shaybah and Hawiyah andYanbu' gas plants.16 SAUDI ARAMCO