Kuwait City: Opec member Kuwait plans to spend as much as $90 billion on oil projects inside and outside the country over the next five years, a top oil executive said on Monday.
"About $90 billion will be spent over the next five years to achieve our strategy," said Hashim Al Refa'ai, managing director for planning with Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC), the emirate's national oil conglomerate.
More than a third of the amount is earmarked for two major projects to build a new refinery at a cost of $14 billion and upgrading two existing refineries for $16.3 billion, he told the sixth annual conference on Kuwait projects organised by Meed.
The two projects have been stalled by political disputes between MPs and the government over the past five years.
The 615,000 barrel per day (bpd) refinery project was scrapped by the government after awarding it to South Korean and Japan-ese firms due to protests by opposition lawmakers that its tendering did not go through the proper legal channels.
Farouq Al Zanqi, the CEO of the national oil company KPC, told reporters yesterday that he is hopeful the two projects will be tendered and awarded next year.
He said KPC is waiting for the Supreme Petroleum Council, the highest oil decision-making body, to meet and take a favourable decision on the two projects, insisting Kuwait needed them.
After completing the two projects, Kuwait plans to shut down Shuaiba refinery, one of three refineries in the country with a total capacity of 930,000 bpd.
And when the two projects are operational, Kuwait will have a refining capacity of 1.4 million bpd.
Kuwait's expenditure plan in the oil sector which supplies 90 per cent of public income, envisages raising oil output capacity to 3.5 million barrels per day by 2015 from 3.1 million bpd currently, Al Refa'ai said.
The ultimate goal of Kuwait's long-term strategy is to raise its output capacity to four million bpd by 2020 and sustain that until 2030, Al Refa'ai, who is also chairman of Oil Development Company, said.
The chairman of Kuwait Oil Co (KOC), a KPC subsidiary responsible for exploration and production, Sami Al Rashid, told the conference the company expects to spend $25 billion over the next five years on projects.
Al Rashid said KOC aims to raise its crude output to 3.65 million bpd by 2020 from around three million bpd now. The remaining 350,000 bpd will come from the neutral zone with Saudi Arabia.
KOC also plans to raise natural gas production, both associated and non-associated, to around 4.5 billion cubic feet (127 million cubic metres) daily by 2030.
