Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Kuwaiti Oil Production


This morning, I've been ploughing through old OPEC and IEA monthly reports to update my very incomplete and out of date graph of Kuwaiti oil production.  The result is above.  I have the EIA and JODI series back to 2000 and 2002 respectively, and then the last three years of OPEC and IEA data (that it, enough to show the fall due to the great recession, and the interval since.

The reason I'm interested is that there is a suggestion in the Saudi data that their production might now be starting to increase.  So I'm interested to know if other Gulf Cooperation Council/OPEC members are starting to increase production also.  I speculate that the GCC countries are more likely to cooperate and follow a common policy with Saudi Arabia (vs maverick countries like Venezuela or Iran that the Saudis would really rather see bombed than happily cooperating).  It's also key to know how close the world is to running out of spare oil production capacity again to know whether core OPEC countries are increasing production or not.  So I want to be in a position to track it closely.

The situation for Kuwait is that production seems to have drifted up a little in 2009 and/or early 2010 (depending on who you believe), but there isn't any evidence of a recent increase in the last six months' worth of data.  So nothing too exciting here, but at least we know where we stand.

1 comment:

KLR said...

I've thrown together an Oil Company Directory, including KOC and KPC. How could I leave out those two? ;) Talk about a labyrinthine subject, looking at the wiki for the Petroleum industry in Kuwait you have a whole alphabet soup of companies to keep track of, any one of whom might be involved in some new Kuwait Project, along with outside help as well, of course.

Looks like they attained the PK goal of close to 3 mb/d ca. 2005, too. EIA mentions 100 kb/d for 2011 from Gathering Center (GC) 24 in the Sabriya field - wiki lists that as 2013. Yet another in a long list of little changes in the scenery.