The world has a long roster of plug-ugly oil countries like Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria and Equatorial Guinea, but a few like Kuwait show concern for their people and the environment.
Produced Water Society President Steve Coffee says Kuwait, small as it is, is a major global player with daily production of 3 million barrels of oil and 650 million cubic feet of natural gas.
The Mideast nation is eighth in the world with reserves of 102 billion barrels of oil even though it has only 17,820 square miles of territory compared to Saudi Arabia’s 829,909.
“I’ve been working there off and on for 28 years,” Coffee said from San Diego, Calif. “Like the Permian Basin, a lot of what they have is aging oil equipment from the late 1980s. “Equipment will last 20-30 years if you take care of it, but after 30-40 years you’ve got to get something new.”
Coffee said the Kuwaitis “are super friendly and helpful, but they don’t make quick changes.”
“You have to be prepared,” he said. “They welcome you in, but it may take time to do business. They’ve learned from the Americans and the Saudis, especially the Saudis, and they are familiar with the red tape of American bureaucracy.
‘They make sure you are serious and completely vetted before you get the green light.”
With big companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil and British Petroleum having done business there for many decades, he said, the Kuwatis “are trying hard to diversify and not make it all about oil.”
“When oil prices are down, their social programs are hurt,” Coffee said. “They’re focusing on overall production and the downstream with the construction of big refineries whereas most of the foreign oil-producing countries have no refineries. If we had the capacity to do more refining in the United States, we could be more independent and produce more because there are a lot of places where we’re not tapped out like Texas, Wyoming and California.
“People talk about us running out of oil, but that’s not going to happen in our lifetime.”
Coffee said Kuwait is spending a lot of money in the next 15 years to upgrade and add more refineries.
“They were derailed with COVID, but they will complete a clean fuels project in 2025 to do things better and cleaner,” he said.
Coffee said most of Kuwait’s oil and gas is in the south part of the country, where it shares a border with Saudi Arabia.
During the Persian Gulf War in 1990-‘91, he said, Iraq set fire to more than 600 wells and laid landmines that were a hazard during the cleanup.
On its website, Chevron says it began steam injection in 2009 at its Large-Scale Steamflood Pilot Project for the carbonate First Eocene reservoir at the Wafra Field. A carbonate reservoir is an oil or gas trap formed in reefs, dolomite and certain types of limestone, it said.
“Typically, carbonate reservoirs are highly fractured and not conducive to steamflooding on a large scale,” the company said. “However, the carbonate Eocene reservoirs at Wafra have properties that are promising for successful steamflooding, which involved injecting steam into heavy oil reservoirs to heat the crude oil underground, thereby reducing its viscosity and enabling its extraction through wells.”
Chevron licenses refining technology and supplies catalysts to Kuwait National Petroleum Co. refineries through its affiliate Chevron Lummus Global and Advanced Reinfing Technolgoies, which has a minority interest in the Kuwait Catalyst Co.
