State-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp. is negotiating performance-related contracts with international oil companies as it seeks to boost oil and gas production, the Financial Times newspaper reports Wednesday.
New contracts - dubbed "enhanced technical service agreements" - will link technical and commercial arrangements to performance, KPC Chief Executive Saad al-Shuwaib told the newspaper.
"It's not like before, where it was technical assistance," he said. "Now it's technical plus performance and its very important for us to meet our milestones and to meet our strategic plans."
He hoped new gas and oil contracts would be finalized in the coming months, according to the FT.
Shuwaib said KPC hoped to increase oil production from about 2.6 million barrels a day to 3 million barrels a day next year - 12 months ahead of its original target - but it would require technical assistance from international groups to meet goals of 3.5 million barrels a day by 2015 and 4 million by 2020.
The FT says KPC is also in talks with several large groups to form a gas project partnership, as Kuwait looks to harvest gas that isn't a byproduct of oil exploration for the first time.
KPC hopes to begin producing the free gas from fields in northern Kuwait this month, with production of 175 million standard cubic feet a day. The goal is for production to rise to 600 million cubic feet during 2011 and 1 billion cubic feet a day by 2015, it said.