“The easy oil is coming to an end,” says Alex Munton, a Middle East analyst for the Scottish energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie.
”All the countries in the Middle East are going to have to start grappling with these [heavy-oil] reserves,” says Andrew Gould, chairman and chief executive of oil-field services giant Schlumberger Ltd., which has worked on several heavy-oil projects in the region. “They’ve never had to think about it before.”