Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) plans to spend KWD1.2 billion ($3.92 billion) on its exploration drilling programme through 2030, its senior executive told Reuters in an interview.
The spending is part of a KWD9.8-billion budget — the company’s biggest ever — allocated for drilling and maintenance of up to 6,193 wells by the end of this decade, said its Deputy CEO for Exploration and Drilling Khaled Al-Mulla.
The spending plan reflects the OPEC producer’s effort to raise its oil production capacity to four million barrels per day (bpd) by 2035, and maintain it until 2040 from 3.2 million bpd announced last month. Kuwait Oil Company is expected to account for 3.65 million bpd of that capacity, with the rest coming from a shared zone with Saudi Arabia.
Al-Mulla said modern technology, including AI tools made deeper, less accessible reservoirs economically viable. For example, the Mutriba field in northwest Kuwait began production in 2025, decades after its discovery.
Since July 2024, KOC has announced three significant offshore oil and gas discoveries and Al-Mulla said the company has achieved a 100 per cent success rate in its first offshore exploration phase so far, which involved drilling six wells.
It will be followed by 18 more wells in the second phase and the company expects to reach offshore production capacity of around 150,000 bpd by 2035. That, however, was "likely to rise after recent promising offshore discoveries", Al-Mulla said.
(Reporting By Ahmed Hagagy Editing by Tomasz Janowski)
