MONDAY, DECEMBER 6, 2004
Kuwait to invest $40 bn in oil facilities
AFP
KUWAIT CITY: OPEC-member Kuwait is planning to invest up to 40 billion dollars over the next 15 years to modernise its outdated oil facilities and boost capacity to four million barrels a day, the chief executive of the state energy company said.
"We have a massive investment programme.We plan to spend between 30 billion to 40 billion dollars in the next 15 years," Hani Hussein of the giant Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC), told an oil symposium late Saturday. "We have a large number of projects to raise our output capacity to four million barrels per day (bpd) by 2020 This needs an investment of 20 billion dollars. We need the help of international companies," Hussein said.
Energy Minister Sheikh Ahmad Fahd al-Sabah also told the symposium that the emirate's new oil strategy involves modernising the oil sector's infrastructure.
"There are plenty of projects to rehabilitate oil facilities, like a project to modernise export terminals," which is estimated to cost some one billion dollars and has been in the pipeline for several years, said the minister.
State-owned Kuwait Oil Tanker Company has recently signed contracts to build seven oil tankers of different sizes to modernise its fleet, Sheikh Ahmed said. The cost of the order is more than 600 million dollars.
The emirate will spend some "10 billion dollars on the oil sector within the next few years," the minister said.
Kuwait has the sixth largest OPEC quota at 2.167 million bpd but its actual production is around 2.5 million bpd. It sits on 10 percent of the world's proven reserves of around 100 billion barrels.
"We have also approved the building of a fourth refinery to become a strategic source of fuel for power stations," Sheikh Ahmad said. According to Hussein, the new refinery with a capacity of 480,000 bpd is expected to cost three to four billion dollars. Bidding for the refinery is expected to open soon.
Kuwait's three refineries -- Al-Ahmadi, Mina Abdullah and Shuaiba -- are all in the southern oil-rich region and have a total capacity of around 920,000 bpd.
The emirate also plans two major petrochemical projects at a cost of some three billion dollars in cooperation with a foreign partner and the domestic private sector, Hussein said.
Using cheap and highly abundant feedstock, Kuwait has established several petrochemical plants in the past several years which are producing hundreds of thousands of tons of various products.
Hussein said Kuwait's development strategy is based on projections and studies that global demand for crude oil will increase by 50 percent to between 125 and 130 million bpd by 2030.
OPEC members and particularly Gulf states will get a good share of the increase, Hussein said.
The emirate's government is battling with the outspoken parliament to pass a seven-billion-dollar investment in the northern oilfields to double output to 900,000 bpd with the help of international oil majors.
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