Saudi Aramco building facilities to tap shale gas: CEO

State-owned Saudi Aramco is building facilities to tap shale gas in the kingdom’s oil-rich eastern region and is making “a lot of progress” toward this goal, Bloomberg reported, citing CEO Amin Nasser.

“We are looking to take our unconventional gas within the next 10 years to 3 billion standard cubic feet a day of shales gas,” Nasser said on Sunday.

The oil major currently produces more than 190 million cubic feet of unconventional gas daily, all of it in the remote north.

The company also plans to build a reverse-osmosis desalination plant to treat seawater for injection into the Jafurah basin to dislodge shale gas.   

The water-treatment facility is in the planning and design phase and could be in operation in four to five years, said Mohammed Al Qahtani, Aramco’s senior vice president for upstream.