Kuwait plans to complete the Al-Zour oil refinery project by December 2019, according to Khaled Mahdi, secretary general of the country’s Supreme Council for Planning and Development.

The deadline ties in with the state objective of achieving a production capacity of 4 million barrels a day (b/d) of crude oil by the end of 2020, up from the current capacity of 3.2 million b/d, according to Mehdi.

MEED reported that the downstream project, which was initially supposed to be completed in May next year, was facing delayS due to a crude transporting pipeline unlikely to be built in time.

Al-Zour is a cornerstone of Kuwait’s development of its broader downstream capabilities, which will include more than doubling the refinery capacity of the state-owned Kuwait National Petroleum Corporation (KNPC) to 2 million b/d by 2035 as part of a $25bn spending plan.

The expansion from around 936,000 b/d of long-held capacity across the Mina al-Ahmadi, Mina Abdullah and Shuaiba refineries will take place over two phases, according to a comment last week from KNPC CEO, Mohammad Ghazi al-Mutairi.

He said that KNPC was currently working to expand capacity to 1.4 million b/d, which includes starting up the greenfield 615,000 b/d Al Zour refinery, following the permanent closure of the 200,000 b/d Shuaiba unit in March 2017.

More specifically, the first phase of the new expansion will take domestic refining capacity up to 1.7 million b/d in 2025, before hitting the 2 million b/d target by 2035 under the second phase. This will include the building of a brand new refinery.

“This expansion will be a solution for the treatment of heavy oil in line with the expected increase in production from the exploration and production sector,” Mutairi has been quoted as saying.

Mutairi added that it built on Kuwait’s previous 2030 goals, set in 2009, which included raising downstream capacity by 480,000 bpd to 1.4 million b/d, factoring in the completion of Al-Zour.

Under the new plan, Kuwait’s domestic refining capacity will represent 42 per cent of the country’s crude oil production capacity by 2040, up from 27 per cent.

As it stands, Al-Zour is around 57 per cent complete, but when finished it will process Kuwait’s heavy crude from the north of the country and provide more low-sulphur fuel oil for domestic power production.

KNPC signed $13bn in contracts in mid-October 2016, allowing for the planned completion of Al-Zour by mid-2017.

Along with other related projects, Al-Zour will produce clean fuel, in addition to kerosene and diesel, for the local power market, processing around 615,000 b/d of crude oil.

To achieve that, the Kuwait Oil Company recently announced it had completed two production centres (numbers 29 and 30) with a capacity of 100,000 b/d each. This, and the completion of the third centre (number 31), is part of the plan to increase the company’s crude oil output in North Kuwait to 1 million b/d, from the current 700,000 b/d.