Kuwait will be able to hike crude throughputs at its new Al Zour refinery well beyond nominal 615,000 b/d capacity “within months of safe and stable operations,” Walid al-Bader, CEO of operator Kipic tells Reuters on 26 October. The CEO expects the refinery to reach full capacity this month. He says a planned 20-30% boost to around 800,000 b/d will not include building new units but implementing improvements at existing ones.
Mr Bader says that Kipic is considering the upgrade in line with parent firm KPC’s long-term 1.6mn b/d 2030 refining capacity target. That said, the prospect of increasing Al Zour’s capacity so soon looks unlikely. KPC CEO Sheikh Nawaf Al Sabah told MEES last month that reaching KPC’s target would entail debottlenecking existing facilities by the end of the decade (MEES, 20 October). (CONTINUED - 230 WORDS)