KOC to give priority to onshore exploration
Considering the age and the level of maturity of the actual fields in operations to deliver 3 million b/d of crude oil, the replacement of depleting fields must also be considered in the total amount of barrels per day to be put in production to reach this target of 4 million b/d in 2020.
Since 1980, KPC is the state wholly-owned national oil company managing Kuwait interests in the oil and gas and petrochemical assets.
Under the umbrella of KPC, KOC is in charge of the upstream activities in the State of Kuwait, thus has got the mandate to define and implement a strategy to reach this goal of 4 million b/d including the replacement of the aging fields.
In Kuwait and withinKPC organization, KOC tasks cover the exploration, drilling, development and production of the oil and gas across the country except the onshore divided zone shared with Saudi Arabia and managed by a dedicated company.
Therefore KOC mission is to identify all the potential unlocked hydrocarbon reserves and implement the strategy to develop them on optimized costs efficiency basis and at the pace given by KPC.
In that respect, the top 3 objectives given to KOC stand on:
– Maintain global market share in increasing production capacity in the north and west of Kuwait while maintaining production in South and East.
– Increase reserves to sustain production growth by the exploration of new fields, better reservoir evaluation and enhanced oil recovery (EOR) technologies to improve the recovery rate from the actual fields.
– Develop the non-associated gas to generate power to the country in order to reduce natural gas import and substitute crude oil wherever applicable.
KOC to deploy Cyclic Steam Stimulation in Lower Fars
In this context and in respect with actual identified unlocked hydrocarbon resources, Kuwait has mostly two locations where to go to find enough quantities of oil and gas reserves to fulfill these goals:
– Offshore oil and gas fields located outside the divided zone in the Gulf
– Onshore heavy crude oil fields in the north of Kuwait, typically the Lower Fars heavy oil field
While the oil and gas fields might be easy to reach, the offshore operations remain always more costly and risky than onshore.
Instead, the exploration and development of the onshore heavy crude oil in the north will require the implementation of advanced techniques for drilling, reservoirs evaluation, production, enhanced recovery that can be re-used partly to improve production and recovery rate in the rest of the country.
In focusing on onshore challenges of heavy crude oil, KOC expects that its efforts will benefit to its entire production in Kuwait.
To move ahead with any delay, KOC is actually proceeding to the pre-qualification of the engineering services companies willing to bid for the design of the Lower Fars Heavy Oil Development Scheme.
From the pilot project tested in the Ratqa field since 2008 by the Saudi Al-Khorayef Commercial Company to extract heavy crude oil trapped in smooth sand reservoirs, KOC selected the cyclic steam stimulation (CSS) technique to develop Lower Fars.
Based on this process, the interested engineering services companies must submit their application to KOC by January 2nd 2013.
