OMAN

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OMAN TO INVEST $ 6.5 B TO RAISE OIL AND GAS OUTPUT

PDO is conducting a study to upgrade upstream gas facility

Oman plans to invest $6.5 billion over five years in a major drive to boost oil and gas production and find new reserves, Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) Managing Director, Steve Ollerearn - shaw said.

Ollerearnshaw said in an interview that staterun PDO had earmarked an annual $1.3 billion until 2005 to boost output and double booked oil reserves through exploration and technological innovation.

"We do see the potential of increasing the level of oil production in the next five years to one million barrels per day (bpd)," Ollerearnshaw said.

He said PDO's current out put was on target at 841,000 bpd, after overcoming production problems last year at the Gulf state's ageing fields.

Independent producer Oman plans to boost oil output to one million bpd by 2004 with the help of foreign producers, including Occidental Petroleum Corporation and Japex, which together currently produce 50,000 bpd.

"Almost every year we find more oil than we produce so the reserves keep going up. In that respect, Oman is not in any way close to running out of oil", Ollerearnshaw said, adding that the Company's current booked reserves in its 114,000 sq km concession stood at around 5.6 billion barrels.

Forecast

"We anticipate over time that we will be able to prove that there may be another five billion in reserves from the fields we have already discovered, by using Enhanced Oil Recovery techniques like steam injection, and on top of that one or two billion barrels from our future explorations", he said.

"We have had some success already this year with new discoveres in the Zalzala and Kauther fields," he said, adding that $120 million was earmarked for exploration in 2001.
PDO has said that Kauther is potentially the largest gas field discovered in Oman in the past six years while Zalzala is targeted to initially produce some 6,000 barrels per day of oil.

PDO is conducting a study to upgrade an upstream gas facility in central Oman to cover future demand, Ollerearnshaw said.

The company is currently producing 38 million cubic metres of gas per day, about one-third of which is used by power stations and industries while the rest is consumed by the Oman LNG plant.

Proven gas reserves stand at 22 trillion cubic feet (635 billion cubic metres). Oman's gas demand is expected to rise to 70 million cubic metres per day in 2005.
(Source : Gulf News - 6th April, 2001)

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