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A Kuwait Oil Company official said crude prices are expected to improve and may climb to USD 60.
Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) is pushing ahead with plans to increase oil output capacity despite the sharp drop in crude oil prices, a KOC official said.
Kuwait, a member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), plans to increase production capacity to 4 million barrels per day (bpd) by 2020 from around 3 million bpd now.
"The sharp drop in oil prices is affecting the whole world, not only Gulf countries. Our strategies are in place and projects will not be interrupted because of the fall in oil prices," Badria Abdul Raheem, director of KOC's heavy crude oilfields development, told Zawya on the sidelines of the Middle East Conference on Heavy Oil held recently in Manama.
"The company's plan for the next two years continues and our capital projects will be completed. We have instructions from senior management not to stop any project," Abdul Raheem said.
KOC, the upstream arm of Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, wants to increase crude output and develop some of its oilfelds including the onshore Burgan field, the world's second largest. Kuwait Petroleum Corp has announced a USD 75 billion capital spending plan for 2015-20, split between USD 40 billion for upstream and USD 35 billion for downstream development, according to Oxford Business Group.
Crude oil prices have fallen from over USD 100 dollars a barrel since mid-2014 to below USD 50.
Abdul Raheem said she does not expect oil prices to return to the USD 100-per-barrel mark. "According to economic reports, we will soon see a clear improvement in prices, which may reach USD 60, and that price level is not bad."
Heavy crude
Abdul Raheem said that KOC has discovered a new oilfield which would substantially contribute to the company's production of heavy crude oil, but did not give further details. She said Kuwait's production of heavy crude oil was expected to reach 60,000 bpd by 2018-2019.
In January, a consortium led by Petrofac was awarded the first phase of KOC's Lower Fars heavy oil development program. The project, valued at around USD 4 billion, is expected to produce around 60,000 bpd by 2018 in the first phase.
Last month, a local newspaper reported that Kuwait had made an offshore discovery of around 14 billion barrels of crude oil equivalent, but Abdul Raheem denied the report. "At the moment, we are exploring the area, but we have no information as to potentially new discoveries," she said.
Kuwait's state news agency KUNA in November quoted a KOC spokesman as saying that offshore exploration was still in the initial stages, with wide-scale exploratory surveys at Burgan field and Kuwait Bay, and that the offshore oil drilling only would start in 2017.
© Zawya 2015