MEOG this week covers an agreement to develop a shared gas field in the shared Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ).

The governments of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia this week agreed a deal for the belated development of the offshore Dorra gas field.

State-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. (KPC) announced that an agreement had been signed by the country’s energy minister, Dr. Mohammad Al Fares, and his Saudi counterpart, Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud, during a visit by the latter to Kuwait.

According to KPC, subsidiary Kuwait Gulf Oil Co. (KGOC) and Saudi Aramco affiliate Aramco Gulf Oil Co. (AGOC) will leverage modern technologies to increase gas production from the asset to 1bn cubic feet (28mn cubic metres) per day alongside 84,000 barrels per day (bpd) of condensate.

Work on the field, which holds 280-310bn cubic metres of gas and around 300mn barrels of oil, has been stalled since 2013. As with the development of the PNZ’s oil assets – Al-Khafji (offshore) and Wafra (onshore) – gas output will be divided evenly between KGOC and AGOC.

Meanwhile, Iraq’s ambitious plans to increase oil production capacity from 5mn bpd to 8mn bpd by 2027 are under threat amid concerns about the Iraqi National Oil Co. (INOC), which was reconstituted last year.

The sector has enjoyed a period of recent growth; however, efforts to involve the state firm in major developments were dealt a blow when the parliament voted to overturn the appointment of its president. Oil Minister Ihsan Abdul Jabbar, who has navigated the Ministry of Oil (MoO) through the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic while convincing most of its IOC partners not to leave, was installed as INOC's president in a move to underpin his position in the sector and maintain continuity into the new parliament.

In mid-2020 the Iraqi Cabinet amended the 2018 INOC legislation following objections by the Federal Supreme Court to the law, which was deemed to be unconstitutional.

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