Reuters
Abu Dhabi
Abu Dhabi plans to invest over $25bn in the next five years on boosting its oil production capacity from offshore fields, a senior official of Abu Dhabi National Oil Co said yesterday. The plan is part of the United Arab Emirates’ strategy of increasing its crude oil output potential to 3.5mn barrels per day by 2017-18. The UAE’s actual current production is around 2.8mn bpd.
“We want to build capacity from production and from number of wells and infrastructure. Our current plan as ADNOC (is to reach) 3.5mn bpd and to sustain it,” Qasem al-Kayoumi, manager of ADNOC’s offshore division of the exploration and production directorate, told
reporters.
Speaking at the Middle East Petroleum and Gas conference in Abu Dhabi, he also said the investment plan for offshore drilling activities was $2.5bn per year.
ADNOC plans to drill around 160 wells per year in the next couple of years, Kayoumi said. “It is a considerable increase - the number of rigs has built up considerably in offshore, it could be more than a 50% increase.”  He also said current production for the ADMA-OPCO and ZADCO oil fields was 1.2mn bpd and “in 2017-18 that figure will go close to, I would say around 1.6mn bpd.”
One of the main UAE fields being developed by Exxon is the giant Upper Zakum, for which the plan is to boost production capacity to 750,000 bpd by 2017-18; this may be raised further to 1mn bpd by 2024.
Kayoumi said ADMA-OPCO was in an early phase of preparing for the renewal of its offshore concession, due to expire in 2018.
“We hope that this concession will be renewed with our (existing) partners and future partners.”