State-owned Kuwait Gulf Oil Company (KGOC), which represents Kuwait in the Divided Zone, has ordered an immediate investigation to try and determine who leaked confidential correspondence between Kuwaiti Oil Minister Ali al-Omar and his Saudi counterpart Ali al-Naimi.

The letter from Al-Omar asked Al-Naimi to resume production at the Khafji oilfield in the Divided Zone and was published by Kuwaiti press on 29 July.

“The leak has been very embarrassing for the oil ministry and Kuwait as a whole,” said one senior public sector source. “The leak is very damaging for relations between the oil ministry and the state-owned oil companies.”

Over the first half of 2015 a dispute over political appointments to the board of Kuwait Petroleum Company (KPC) led to increasingly poor relations between the oil minister and the CEO of KPC, Nizar Mohammad Al-Adsani.

Pressure from senior political figures helped to find a compromise between the two figures, which involved the expansion of the KPC board.

However, there are concerns that the leaked letter could spark a new era of reduced cooperation between the oil ministry and KPC, something that could delay progress on key projects.

The Khafji oil field was unilaterally closed by Saudi Arabia in October last year.

Production at the offshore Khafji field was more than 300,000 barrels a day (b/d) before it was shut down.

At the time Saudi Arabia officially said it was shut down for environmental reasons. However, industry sources have told MEED that the field was shut due to an ongoing dispute over land use in the Divided Zone, an area that is shared by the two countries.

In the first half of 2015 production at Wafra, another field in the divided zone, was also stopped.

The official reason given for the shutdown at the time was field maintenance, but industry sources say that this shutdown is also due to the dispute between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

 Kuwait is currently struggling to meet its 2020 production target of 4 million b/d.

 Average production over 2014 was 3.1 million b/d.