London: Mubadala Development Co., an investment unit of the Abu Dhabi government, raised its oil and natural gas output 14.3 per cent, driven by growth in Bahrain.
Production is at 400,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day, up from 350,000 a year earlier, Maurizio la Noce, chief executive officer of Mubadala's oil unit, said yesterday at the Oil and Money conference in London.
Mubadala, Occidental Petroleum Corp. and National Oil and Gas Authority of Bahrain in November last year agreed to develop the Bahrain oilfield.
The venture plans to boost gas output capacity at the field to about 2.7 billion cubic feet a day from 1.3 billion cubic feet, Bahrain's Energy Minister Abdul Hussain Mirza said in May.
Mubadala started drilling for oil and gas in the Caspian Sea at Kazakhstan's Block-N three weeks ago, where it's exploring with Houston-based Conoco-Phillips, la Noce said. The company is interested in exploration in the Turkmen area of the Caspian, la Noce said. He declined to comment on whether the company is interested in buying assets from BP.
ConocoPhillips Chief Executive Officer Jim Mulva said at a conference on September 15 that the venture's drilling in the Caspian has a good chance of finding hydrocarbons.
"We feel that we're in a providence of known hydrocarbons, very large feature, because in the early 1980s, the Soviets drilled a well and unfortunately had to kick a blow-out," Mulva said, according to a transcript of the conference.
