Kuwait Energy

Prior to the 20th century, Kuwait’s merchants and pearl divers leveraged the country’s location to offer their wares on trade flows connecting British India with the Ottoman Empire’s Arabic-speaking realms. The 1938 discovery of oil in the Burgan field did not disrupt those trade flows but replaced their cargoes with oil, which became the...

While generally well-endowed with oil of a variety of grades, Kuwait’s Greater Burgan field in the southeast is the world’s second-largest after Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. Consisting of the Burgan, Magwa and Ahmadi reservoirs, Greater Burgan makes up the lion’s share of Kuwait’s production, with average output of 1.1m-1.3m barrels per day (bpd),...

With one of the highest rates of energy consumption per capita in the world, meeting electricity demand is a pressing concern for Kuwait. According to the World Bank’s World Development Indicators, the country was the fourth-largest consumer of electricity per capita in 2011. A growing economy and an increasingly wealthy population is pushing...

Management of the external operations of the state oil company, Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC), is delegated to various subsidiaries, which are particularly focused on expanding the state’s assets abroad.

Kuwait’s oil reserves include a total of approximately 13bn barrels of heavy crude oil, located primarily in the country’s northern fields of Raudhatain, Sabriya, Abdali, and Ratqa, as well as the Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ). Developing production in the northern Jurassic fields will help the government to meet the key objective of Project...

Along with Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq and Venezuela, Kuwait is a founding member of OPEC, which holds almost 81% of the world’s proven oil reserves, with over 66% of these stocks located in the Middle East. Despite having just over a 10th of the landmass of England, Kuwait holds the sixth-largest proven oil reserves in the world, according to...