KUWAIT CITY, Nov 5: Opec member Kuwait plans to spend some $100 billion on oil projects inside and outside the Gulf state over the next five years, a top oil executive said on Monday.

“Around $100 billion has been earmarked for oil projects... 60 per cent of it on upstream projects inside and outside Kuwait,” CEO of national oil conglomerate Kuwait Petroleum Corp. Faruq al-Zanki told reporters.

The expenditure is part of the emirate’s long-term strategy to raise output capacity to 4.0 million barrels per day from the current 3.0 million, Zanki said on the sidelines of the Kuwait Energy Projects conference organised by the Middle East Economic Digest (MEED).

Construction of a new 615,000 bpd refinery and the clean fuel project to modernise two of the country’s three refineries, both costing $30 billion, are part of the spending plan, Zanki said. National refiner Kuwait National Petroleum Co. (KNPC) last month appointed Foster Wheeler and Amec companies as consultants for the two projects slated to be completed by 2018.

Zanki said that KNPC, a subsidiary of KPC, expects to tender the two projects by the start of next year after they had been repeatedly delayed due to political bickering. The two projects are projected to raise Kuwait’s refining capacity to 1.4 million bpd from the current 930,000 bpd. When the two projects are complete, Kuwait plans to shut the Shuaiba refinery.

Kuwait is engaged in advanced talks with China and Vietnam for multi-billion-dollar joint ventures to build two oil refinery and petrochemical complexes.

The emirate also has oil production operations in several countries through its state-owned Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Co. (KUFPEC). Kuwait Petroleum International runs refineries and petrol stations in Europe as well. Kuwait, OPEC’s third largest producer, says it sits on 10 per cent of the world’s proven crude reserves and is pumping 3.0 million bpd. —AFP