State-owned Kuwait Oil Co. has started operations at a new gathering center that can handle 100,000 b/d of crude oil as the OPEC producer forges ahead with plans to expand its production capacity.

GC-31 in northern Kuwait will also process 62.5 MMcf/d of associated gas and 240,000 b/d of treated water, KOC said in a statement carried by state-owned news agency KUNA on Sept. 18. A gathering center is a facility that collects oil from a field to be transferred usually by pipelines.

Petrofac built GC-31, one of three gathering centers that the UK company has constructed for KOC, each of which will be able to produce 100,000 b/d, along with associated water and gas.

Petrofac has also won a $1.3 billion project to construct GC-32 at Burgan, the country's largest oil field located in the southeast. Work on GC-32 was supposed to end in mid-2020.

Burgan gathering center

The GC-32 project is the first sour crude gathering center to be developed at Burgan and will 120,000 b/d process crude and associated gas from the Arifjan, Marat, Minagish Oolite and Burgan Wara high hydrogen sulphide fields.

In 2018, Kuwait Petroleum Corp, the parent company of KOC, revealed plans to raise production capacity to 4.75 million b/d by 2040. It has revised expansion plans over the years, with a goal of 4 million b/d set for 2020 which hasn't been updated. Kuwait currently has production capacity of about 3 million b/d.

Its crude oil production was 2.43 million b/d in August, below its 2.451 million b/d OPEC+ quota, according to the latest S&P Global Platts OPEC+ survey.

Kuwait is one of five countries that negotiated a higher baseline for its quota in a July 18 OPEC+ meeting. Kuwait's baseline of 2.809 million b/d through April 2022 will be raised to 2.959 million b/d starting in May 2022.