Kuwait on defensive over capacity decline

KPC chief claims remediation is just around the corner, but his assessment appears improbably upbeat

Kuwait had been formally targeting oil production capacity of 4mn bl/d by 2020—including output from the Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ), shared with Saudi Arabia—for over a decade. Last year, the goal was quietly put back to 2040. But, buried in the Arabic-only annual report of its domestic upstream subsidiary Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), was a revelation that output capacity had shrunk by 177,000bl/d in the 12 months to end-of-March 2021, to less than 2.63mn bl/d—c.500,000bl/d less than that stated three years earlier. Near-perfect adherence to its Opec+ cuts appears to have masked a decay in the ability to pump the nation’s economic lifeblood. Kuwait Petroleum Corporation (KPC) CEO Hashem Has