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Halliburton signs up for drilling campaign offshore Kuwait
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STATE-OWNED Kuwait Oil Co. (KOC) has signed a KWD181.4mn ($597mn) deal with US rm Halliburton to drill six exploratory wells o - shore Kuwait. e move marks the country’s rst e ort to develop its limited o shore area.
KOC – KPC’s domestic upstream operat- ing arm – has been promising to start drilling o shore for many years, with separate surveys completed by Canada’s Sander Geophysics and China’s BGP during the rst half of the decade. Announcing the Halliburton deal, KOC CEO Emad Sultan said that the campaign would add 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) to Kuwaiti production.
He added that two rigs would be utilised in the project’s rst phase.
e announcement comes 18 months a er KOC was rst reported to have invited Hallibur- ton and fellow US oil eld services rms Baker- Hughes and Schlumberger to submit bids for the drilling campaign.
At that point, it was noted that two sites had been selected – one inside and one outside
Kuwait Bay.
e country currently has a crude oil produc-
tion capacity of around 3mn bpd, with an ambi- tious target of reaching 4mn bpd from wholly owned elds by 2020 still at the fore of strategic decision-making in Kuwait.
ere is also yet to be a breakthrough in the years-long quarrel between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia about the development of assets in the shared Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ).
in o shore development, as with the similarly long-delayed exploitation of the country’s Juras- sic gas reserves, KOC is caught between the same two stools of a lack of in-house experience cou- pled with political opposition to the involvement of international oil companies (iOCs).
KPC’s overseas upstream subsidiary Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co. (KUFPEC) has always had a two-fold brief – to be a prof- itable business in its own right and to invest in projects and geographies o ering the possibility of technology and resource transfer to the local market.™
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 26 02•July•2019