Syria's oil recovery starts with workovers, not wells

The instinct when a country's oil production collapses is to ask how many new wells it needs.

For Syria, that is the wrong first question.

Production fell from roughly 380,000 barrels a day before 2011 to between 50,000 and 80,000 barrels a day by 2021 — a decline of around 80 per cent. Gas fell from about 900 million cubic feet a day on a similar trajectory.

Fields do not lose 80 per cent of their output because the oil left. It is still there. What was lost was the ability to lift it, treat it and move it.

That is a different problem from finding hydrocarbons, and it has a much cheaper solution.

The cheapest barrel is one already discovered

Wood Mackenzie expects Syrian production to begin recovering in 2026, and is specific about the mechanism: low-cost workovers, artificial lift upgrades and surface facility repairs.

None of that is exploration. None of it is new drilling.

A workover is remedial work on a well that already exists. The hole is drilled, the casing is cemented, the surface location is built. What has failed is usually downhole — a pump, a length of tubing, a plugged perforation — and replacing it restores a well that was producing before.

Artificial lift is the equipment that brings fluid to surface once a reservoir can no longer push it there unaided. Upgrading it on wells that already flow is incremental engineering, not a new project.

Surface facility repair covers the separators, treatment plant, tanks and pipelines between the wellhead and the export point. A field with intact wells and a damaged gathering system produces nothing, and the fix is above ground where it can be seen and costed.

Each of these costs a fraction of a new well. Collectively they typically recover a large share of lost production for a small share of the capital new drilling would need.

That is why they come first — in Syria and in every damaged oil province.

1.3 billion barrels already found

The consultancy puts remaining discovered resources at at least 1.3 billion barrels of oil equivalent.

The word doing the work is discovered. This is not an estimate of what might be found by exploring. It is what has already been located, mapped and in most cases produced from.

That distinction shapes the whole recovery case. A country whose remaining resource is undiscovered needs seismic surveys, exploration wells and a decade. A country with 1.3 billion barrels of equivalent already found and partly developed needs its existing infrastructure working.

Syria is in the second position, and it is the more favourable one for a near-term recovery — though not for a long-term one, which is where the offshore exploration programme comes in.

Control had to change first

None of the engineering was possible without a change in who held the assets.

In February the government began procedures to take over Rmeilan and al-Suwaydiyah in al-Hasakah governorate — the two largest fields in the northeast — as part of an agreement with the Syrian Democratic Forces returning resources to central state control.

Those fields sit alongside the country's principal remaining production. The Omar field is Syria's largest oil field; Tabiyeh is a principal gas asset; further production lies in Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa.

Wood Mackenzie's Alexandre Araman, its director of Middle East upstream, put the significance plainly: the transfer of control over Syria's northeast "could mark a structural turning point for the country's energy sector."

The reason is procedural rather than geological. An international operator cannot contract with a counterparty that does not hold the asset. Until control was consolidated, the fields were not investable regardless of what they contained.

Money had to be able to move

A second barrier was financial and equally decisive.

SWIFT transfers resumed in mid-2025, and that single change did more for the practical prospects of the sector than any technical development.

Oil operations run on international payments — contractors, equipment imports, service companies, revenue receipts. Without the ability to send and receive money through the standard banking network, those transactions are impractical for most foreign companies whatever the legal position technically permits.

Restoring payment rails is not a headline event. It is the difference between an agreement that can be executed and one that cannot.

What recovery does not mean

Rehabilitation restores production toward a field's prior capability. It does not exceed it.

Workovers, lift upgrades and facility repairs recover what was lost. They do not add reserves, and they run into a ceiling set by what the fields could deliver when they were last properly maintained — which was itself well below the 380,000 barrels a day of 2010.

Beyond that ceiling, growth requires new development drilling, then exploration, on the multi-year timescales those carry.

So a realistic reading of 2026 is the start of a curve rather than a return to pre-war output. The early barrels are the cheap ones. The expensive ones come later, if at all.

The sequence, not the ambition

Syria's upstream recovery has a clear order, and it is not the order announcements usually suggest.

Control of the assets came first, in February. Payment rails came before that, in mid-2025. Rehabilitation of existing wells and facilities comes next, through 2026. New drilling follows. Frontier exploration — the offshore block with Chevron — sits furthest out and may return nothing.

Each stage is cheaper and more certain than the one after it.

A country rebuilding an oil industry from 50,000 barrels a day does the cheap, certain things first. The interesting question is not whether Syria can find more oil.

It is how much of what it already found it can get flowing again.