Oil production capacity in Kuwait has hit a more than decade high of 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd), Tareq Al-Roumi, the Oil Minister of one of OPEC’s top producers, told local newspaper Al Qabas.
Kuwait had a similar production capacity in the late 2000s, with capacity hitting the highest on record of 3.3 million bpd in 2010. Kuwait’s oil production capacity began to drop after 2010, but the OPEC heavyweight has launched a program in recent years to raise it.
Earlier this year, Kuwait said it plans to invest as much as $50 billion to raise its oil production capacity to above 3 million bpd over the next five years, Arabian Gulf Business Insight (AGBI) quoted Kuwait Petroleum Corporation’s deputy chairman and CEO, Shaikh Nawaf Al-Sabah, as saying.
Kuwait is “planning to invest $9 to $10 billion annually in the next five years” to increase oil production capacity, Al-Sabah said.
Kuwait, a founding member of OPEC, is the cartel’s fifth-largest producer, behind Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
Despite the increased production capacity, Kuwait continues to abide by the OPEC+ agreements and will pump 2.559 million bpd from October, Al-Roumi told the Al Qabas newspaper in an interview.
Early in September, the eight OPEC+ producers – Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iraq, UAE, Kuwait, Kazakhstan, Algeria, and Oman – tapped the 1.65 million bpd cuts announced in April 2023. The producers will return 137,000 bpd of these cuts to the market in October, “in view of a steady global economic outlook and current healthy market fundamentals, as reflected in the low oil inventories,” OPEC said.
The OPEC+ decision was based on market developments and estimates that crude inventories have fallen below the five-year average, the Kuwaiti minister told Al Qabas.
Still, he reiterated OPEC’s position that the production increase could be paused or reversed, depending on market developments.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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