Which one of the following pairs (Country – Oil field) is not correctly matched ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — B, Kuwait – Kashagan. Kashagan is not a Gulf field at all: it lies offshore in Kazakhstan's sector of the Caspian Sea, in the shallow northern Caspian off Atyrau. It was discovered in 2000 and was, at the time, the largest oil discovery anywhere in about thirty years, with roughly 13 billion barrels of recoverable crude — which is why it is a name examiners like. Kuwait's own fields are elsewhere and have different names: Burgan, discovered in February 1938 (drilling of Burgan No. 1 began in 1937) and one of the largest oil fields ever found, together with Raudhatain, Sabriya and Minagish. Pairing Kuwait with Kashagan therefore crosses two different petroleum provinces — the Persian Gulf basin and the Caspian basin — and that is the pair the question calls broken. Notice how the item is built: the other three pairs sit inside the Gulf, so the odd one is the one that has quietly moved a thousand kilometres north into Central Asia while keeping a plausible-sounding K-name. A useful mental hook is that the Caspian's oil belongs to Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Russia and Iran, and Kuwait does not touch the Caspian at any point.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) Correctly matched, so it cannot be the answer. Haft Kel (also written Haftkel or Haft Gel) is an oil field in Iran's Khuzestan province, roughly 58 km south-east of Masjed Soleyman. It was discovered in 1928 during the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's inter-war exploration drive and was the company's second great find after Masjed Soleyman, which in 1908 had given the Middle East its first commercial oil. Haft Kel ran on primary production for decades, with an early plateau of about 200,000 barrels a day.  (c) Correctly matched. Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia's Eastern Province, is where the well Dammam No. 7 — remembered as the 'Prosperity Well' — struck oil in commercial quantity on 3 March 1938, the discovery that turned the kingdom into an oil state and that Aramco was built around. Do not reject this option on the technicality that Dhahran is a town and the reservoir is properly the Dammam field: Indian geography texts and the examiners who write from them list Dhahran as Saudi Arabia's oil centre, and the country is unambiguously right. Saudi Arabia's giant field is Ghawar, found ten years later in 1948.  (d) Correctly matched. The Az Zubayr (Zubair) field lies in southern Iraq, west of Basra, and was discovered in 1949; it holds about 4.5 billion barrels of proven reserves and is one of the southern Iraqi fields opened to international operators after 2009. Iraq's other well-known fields follow the same north–south split — Kirkuk in the north, and Rumaila, West Qurna, Majnoon and Nahr Umr in the Basra region alongside Zubair.

Concept: World petroleum is concentrated in a handful of sedimentary basins, and prelims questions almost always test whether you can put a named field in the right basin and the right country. Three basins carry most of the names an aspirant will meet: the Persian Gulf basin, by far the richest, holding Ghawar and Safaniya in Saudi Arabia, Burgan in Kuwait, Rumaila, Kirkuk and Zubair in Iraq, and the Khuzestan fields of Iran; the Caspian basin, holding Kashagan and Tengiz in Kazakhstan and the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli complex off Azerbaijan; and the North Sea, which gives the Brent benchmark. The Gulf fields are mostly onshore or shallow-offshore Cretaceous and Jurassic carbonates; the north Caspian fields are offshore, ice-affected and technically difficult, which is why Kashagan took thirteen years from discovery to first oil.

State PCS 2024 Q78 — Geography PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2024 Q78 — Geography PYQ with Answer