Kuwait plans to set up a separate company to run the $7-billion Project Kuwait to hike output from northern oilfields with the help of international oil firms, Energy Minister Shaikh Ahmad Al Fahd Al Sabah said.

“There will be competition in the coming period among Kuwaiti companies on the issue of production,” the minister said.
“There’s KOC (Kuwait Oil Company) as a major production company in Kuwait and there’s KUFPEC as a production firm (operating) outside of Kuwait ... and there’s the company responsible for the northern oilfields project, but this will be set up after it is approved by parliament,” he added.
KOC and KUFPEC are government-run upstream subsidiaries of state-owned Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC), in overall charge of the upstream and downstream oil sectors in the Gulf Arab state which has about a tenth of global petroleum reserves.
The new private company in charge of the northern oilfields project will be headed by Ahmed Al Arbeed, recently awarded the newly-created post of a KPC managing director in charge of Project Kuwait.
According to senior energy officials, Kuwait plans to increase its output to about 3.5 million bpd by 2010 and four million bpd or more by the year 2020.