AL-AHMADI, Kuwait, 24 February 2005 — Kuwait yesterday opened a pier touted as the largest and most advanced in the Middle East, as the oil-rich state seeks to boost its export capacity of crude and petroleum products.
The 2.1-kilometer (1.3-mile) offshore pier at Kuwait’s largest refinery of Al-Ahmadi was built by South Korean Hyundai Engineering at a cost of more than $330 million and took three years to complete.
The state-of-the-art pier was “designed to deal with crude supertankers with a capacity of 350,000 tons in addition to natural gas and methanol tankers”, said Sami Al-Rasheed, chairman of Kuwait National Petroleum Co. (KNPC). The pier replaces one built in 1949, which was modernized in 1985, and is designed to serve the emirate for the next 30 years, Rasheed said.
With its six platforms, the pier can handle four tankers simultaneously and will reduce loading time from 48 hours to 30 hours, thus boosting export capacity.
Al-Ahmadi is the largest of Kuwait’s three oil refineries which have a combined daily production capacity of 917,000 barrels. More than 40 percent of Kuwait’s oil exports are in the form of refined products, while it currently produces around 2.3 million barrels per day (bpd).
Energy Minister Sheikh Ahmed Fahd Al-Sabah said the new project was a signal to the world oil market that Kuwait was working hard to contribute to meeting rising global demand for oil.
The project is part of an ambitious multi-billion-dollar investment program to rehabilitate and modernize the infrastructure of the oil sector that generates more than 90 percent of public revenues. The minister said Kuwait plans to invest some $10 billion in the coming four years as part of its long-term strategy to boost output and export capacities to four million bpd by 2020. “We plan to offer two key projects in the coming months to modernize the oil pipeline network and the main export facilities at a cost of $2 billion,” he told reporters after the opening ceremony. The emirate plans to build a fourth refinery with a capacity of 400,000 bpd, Sheikh Ahmad said. The cost is estimated at $3 billion.
Kuwait has also ordered seven new tankers with the first to be delivered in 2006, he said, while the emirate pursues an aggressive policy to find new markets for the planned increase in production.
The Gulf state has signed a contract with South Korea raising exports to the Southeast Asian nation from 120,000 bpd to 200,000 bpd over the next 10 years, he added. It is also working with China to raise its crude oil exports from the current 20,000 bpd to 350,000 bpd and is to open a marketing office in Beijing later this month, Sheikh Ahmed said.
