Kuwait's oil sector continues to show signs of recovery from the Persian Gulf war.
On Mar. 23 Kuwait Petroleum Co. (KPC) loaded the country's first shipment of liquefied petroleum gas for export since the Iraqi invasion in August 1990.
In addition, the first shipment of Kuwaiti crude recovered from giant oil lakes formed by hundreds of wild wells sabotaged in the war was to arrive by tanker in Naples, Italy, late last month.
The tanker is carrying 210,000 bbl of crude.
However, the project to clean up the lakes and recover more oil, undertaken by Bechtel Corp. with Kuwait Oil Co. (KOC), has reached a standstill.
About 22,500 tons of propane and 18,400 tons of butane were shipped from the south pier of Mina al-Ahmadi port aboard Kuwait's Gas al-Ahmadi tanker.
The south pier, damaged during the invasion and the only pier equipped for loading LPG, required 6 months to repair.
The LPG is headed for Japan to Mitsui Oil & Gas Co., a major purchaser of Kuwait's LPG prior to the invasion.
Middle East Economic Survey (MEES) reported KPC signed a 5 year contract for LPG exports to Turkey's Tupras, the Kuwaiti company's first major LPG export sales contract since the invasion.
MEES said about 1.3 million tons of LPG is expected to be available for export from Kuwait this year. The country is targeting LPG exports of 2.5 million tons/year by 1993, a volume that depends on oil production reaching 1.5 million b/d.
Kuwait boosted production to 820,000 b/d late last month, up about 4% in a period of 2 weeks. It has 149 wells on stream, including those in the Neutral Zone it shares with Saudi Arabia. Iraq sabotaged 732 wells.
CRUDE LAKES
The project to clean up the Kuwaiti oil lakes, estimated by various sources at 30-100 million bbl, has halted.
Jassim Al-Sadoun of Al-Shall Economic Consultants said the project stopped because the cleanup team lacks technology to make the weathered crude usable and is running out of crude storage, Middle East News Network (MENN) reported.
He said the price offered for the end product is not more than $7/bbl, and if the cost to treat the crude exceeds that, Kuwait could only stand to lose on the project.
Bechtel's Project Coordination Manager Dwane Buktenica said about 1.5 million bbl of crude had been recovered from the lakes as of Mar. 17. Bechtel had vacuumed and pumped more than 1 million bbl by early January this year.
Vacuum trucks are continuing to move some oil from smaller lakes to larger ones.
"We found the job is more complicated than we thought," said Buktenica. "The different oil lakes were found to have great amounts of different mixtures that require different chemicals to treat them correctly."
Bechtel and KOC have developed a special testing program, but that includes sending samples abroad, which further prolongs cleanup.
In January KOC withdrew the offer to take bids on cleaning up the lakes from international contractors (OGJ, Feb. 17, Newsletter). MENN reported more than 100 firms submitted proposals for the job, including a southern U.S. firm that sources said offered to buy and transport the untreated crude.
Meantime, bids are being evaluated to construct eighteen 250,000-500,000 bbl crude storage tanks. The crude that has been recovered is being stored at Mina Abdullah.
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