State-owned Kuwait Oil Co has started operations at a new gathering center that has a crude-oil handling capacity of 100,000 barrels per day or bpd, local reports have said.
This comes as the OPEC producer moves forward with plans to expand its production capacity, said the local reports.
A gathering center is a facility that collects oil from a field to be transferred usually by pipelines.
This gathering center is formally referred to as GC-31 and is located in in northern Kuwait, said the reports.
It is also expected to process 62.5 million cubic feet per day (MMcf/d) of associated gas and 240,000 bpd of treated water, KOC said in a statement.
GC-31, built by Dodsal, is one of three gathering centers that have been constructed, each of which will be able to produce 100,000 bpd, along with associated water and gas.
Petrofac has also won a $1.3-billion project to construct GC-32 at Burgan, Kuwait’s largest oil field located in the southeast. Work on GC-32 was supposed to end in mid-2020.
The GC-32 project is the first sour-crude gathering center to be developed at Burgan, and will 120,000 bpd process crude and associated gas from the Arifjan, Marat, Minagish Oolite, and Burgan Wara high-hydrogen-sulfide fields.
In 2018, Kuwait Petroleum Corp, the parent company of KOC, revealed plans to raise production capacity to 4.75 million bpd by 2040.
It has revised expansion plans over the years, with a goal of 4 million bpd set for 2020, which hasn’t been updated. Kuwait currently has production capacity of about 3 million bpd.
Its crude oil production was 2.43 million bpd in August, below its 2.451 million bpd OPEC+ quota, according to the latest S&P Global Platts OPEC+ survey.
Kuwait is one of five countries that negotiated a higher baseline for its quota in a July 18 OPEC+ meeting.
Kuwait’s baseline of 2.809 million bpd through April 2022 will be raised to 2.959 million bpd starting in May 2022.