Kuwait Oil Company, the national oil firm of one of OPEC’s biggest Gulf producers, plans to invest as much as $3.9 billion (1.2 billion Kuwaiti dinars) in exploration drilling by 2030, a senior company executive told Reuters in an interview published on Wednesday.
The exploration drilling program is part of a bigger drilling and maintenance program by the end of the decade, with a budget of $32 billion (9.8 billion dinars), Khaled Al-Mulla, Kuwait Oil Company’s Deputy CEO for Exploration and Drilling, told Reuters.
This is the biggest long-term budget for the Kuwaiti national oil company ever. With it, the firm plans to drill and maintain up to 6,193 wells by 2030.
Oil production capacity in Kuwait this year hit a more than decade high of 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd), Tareq Al-Roumi, the Oil Minister of Kuwait, said last month.
Kuwait had a similar production capacity in the late 2000s, with capacity hitting the highest on record of 3.3 million bpd in 2010. Kuwait’s oil production capacity began to drop after 2010, but the OPEC heavyweight has launched a program in recent years to raise it.
Earlier this year, Kuwait said it plans to invest as much as $50 billion to raise its oil production capacity to nearly 4 million bpd over the next five years, Arabian Gulf Business Insight (AGBI) quoted Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s deputy chairman and CEO, Shaikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, as saying.
Kuwait is “planning to invest $9 to $10 billion annually in the next five years” to increase its oil production capacity, Al-Sabah said.
Kuwait, a founding member of OPEC, is the cartel’s fifth-largest producer, behind Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Higher oil production capacity could help Kuwait argue for a higher oil production quota in the OPEC+ deal, with which the major Gulf producers and Russia have been managing supply for nearly a decade.
By Michael Kern for Oilprice.com
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