Inside the high-tech world of Saudi Aramco. (image: saudiaramco.com)

Saudi Aramco has two new entries on the TOP500 biannual list of the world’s 500 fastest supercomputers, which was released this week, the Wall Street Journal’s Environmental Capital Blog reported Thursday. The supercomputers, which are Dell clusters and run Intel processors, came in at nos. 119 and 134.

Peak oil believers could argue that an interest in supercomputers on the part of Saudi Arabia’s national oil company suggests that Aramco needs significant help to identify new reservoirs in oil fields once believed to be bottomless. And the Saudis are not alone in using a supercomputer in their quest for ever-elusive black gold. The world’s fifth-largest supercomputer—the Tianhe-1 in Tiajin, China—is slated to be used partly for “petroleum exploration.”

The oil industry’s growing interest in supercomputers would seem to corroborate the opinion of geologist and author Jeremy Leggett and the colleagues that he surveyed at this year’s Petroleum Geology Conference in London. HeatingOil.com posted on Nov. 10 that in a poll Leggett conducted during a plenary session, 70 percent of 500 geologists said that peak oil is still a concern.