Before Jafurah became the Middle East’s largest liquids-rich shale gas play, Saudi Arabia had an enormous unconventional resource beneath its eastern desert.
The gas was there.
Making it flow commercially at scale was another matter.
Jafurah spans roughly 17,000 km² and is estimated to contain 229 trillion standard cubic feet of raw gas in place and 75 billion barrels of condensate in place.
But unconventional gas doesn’t surrender easily.
Low-permeability rock meant discovery was only the beginning:
Horizontal drilling • Hydraulic fracturing • Subsurface modelling • Completions • Gathering • Compression • Processing • Pipelines
The numbers behind Jafurah
17,000 km² — field area
229 tscf — raw gas in place
75 billion barrels — condensate in place
$100+ billion — expected lifecycle investment
2 bscfd — targeted sales gas by 2030
420 mmscfd — targeted ethane
~630,000 bpd — targeted high-value liquids
One distinction matters:
229 tscf is gas in place — not proved reserves.
In 2024, Aramco separately announced an additional 15 tscf of raw gas and 2 billion barrels of condensate booked as proved reserves at Jafurah.
Then came the infrastructure.
$10 billion in initial subsurface and EPC contracts in 2021.
Another $12.4 billion for Phase II in 2024, including compression facilities, pipelines, additional processing trains and associated infrastructure.
This wasn’t simply a well-development programme.
It was the construction of an unconventional gas ecosystem.
Then, in December 2025, the story changed.
Jafurah produced its first unconventional shale gas.
In Q1 2026, Phase I exported its first condensate shipment. By August, Aramco reported Phase I maintaining steady production of sales gas and condensate, while Phase II progressed towards expected completion in 2027.
And in 2026, the engineering story moved another step forward.
A new multi-year stimulation and completion programme is introducing intelligent fracturing automation and real-time stimulation monitoring as unconventional development scales.
The challenge is no longer simply getting one well to flow.
It is making performance repeatable at industrial scale.
And the story doesn’t stop at the field.
Jafurah → Processing → Master Gas System → Power → Petrochemicals → Industry
Aramco now targets approximately 80% growth in sales-gas production capacity by 2030 versus 2021, with Jafurah central to that expansion.
Saudi Arabia didn’t simply discover 229 trillion cubic feet of raw gas.
The geology was already underground.
The industrial system required to make it commercially useful had to be engineered above it.
SMEC | Engineering Then & Now
