Kuwait and oil reserves

During the last two months we now have seen two articles with alarming news about the production of crude oil from Kuwait. The first came in November by James Cordahi and Andy Critchlow at Bloomberg and was entitled: Kuwait Oil Field, World’s Second Largest, ‘Exhausted’. A quote from the article:

The plateau in output from the Burgan field will be about 1.7 million barrels a day, rather than as much as the 2 million a day that engineers had forecast could be maintained for the rest of the field’s 30 to 40 years of life, said Farouk al-Zanki, the chairman of state-owned Kuwait Oil Co. Kuwait will spend about $3 billion a year for the next three years to expand output and exports, three times the recent average.
To boost oil supplies, “Burgan by itself won’t be enough because we’ve exhausted that, with its production capability now much lower than what it used to be,” al-Zanki said during an interview in his office in Ahmadi, 20 kilometers south of Kuwait City. “We tried 2 million barrels a day, we tried 1.9 million, but 1.7 million is the optimum rate for the facilities and for economics.”

Reuters has just delivered a second alarming message: OPEC producer Kuwait’s oil reserves are only half those officially stated, according to internal Kuwaiti records seen by industry newsletter Petroleum Intelligence Weekly (PIW). “PIW learns from sources that Kuwait’s actual oil reserves, which are officially stated at around 99 billion barrels, or close to 10 percent of the global total, are a good deal lower, according to internal Kuwaiti records,” the weekly PIW reported on Friday. It said that according to data circulated in Kuwait Oil Co (KOC), the upstream arm of state Kuwait Petroleum Corp, Kuwait’s remaining proven and non-proven oil reserves are about 48 billion barrels. Officials from KOC were not immediately available for comment to Reuters. PIW said the official public Kuwaiti figures do not distinguish between proven, probable and possible reserves. But it said the data it had seen show that of the current remaining 48 billion barrels of proven and non-proven reserves, only about 24 billion barrels are so far fully proven — 15 billion in its biggest oilfield Burgan.

ASPO