Kuwait’s cabinet has approved a bill to endorse a pact for oil and gas co-operation with China, an official statement said.
“The Council of Ministers discussed a draft law that endorses the co-operation agreement in the oil and gas sectors between the governments of Kuwait and China, and the Council decided to approve the draft,” the statement said.
The draft was sent to the Amir for ratification.
Kuwait is studying plans to build a multi-billion-dollar refinery and a petrochemical plant in Guangdong in south China with PetroChina.
Kuwait has said it welcomes Chinese firms seeking to invest in its oil sector.
It has said Chinese firms would be invited to participate in an $8.5 billion project involving multinationals to boost crude oil output from the country’s northern fields.
A Kuwait Petroleum Corp (KPC) official, meanwhile, said Kuwait could export up to 300,000 tonnes a month of low-sulphur fuel oil (LSFO) when the country's new 615,000 barrels per day (bpd) refinery comes up in 2010/2011.
This will be the first time the state refiner, which exports only supercracked fuel oil, will be producing LSFO to meet new local emission standards for use mostly by domestic oil-fired thermal plants, Emad Al Abdul Karim, KPC’s manager of planning and marketing, said in Singapore.
“The new refinery at Al Zour is designed mainly for this purpose. It can produce up to 1 million tonnes of straight-run LSFO a year, which will be used mainly for domestic power generation,” he said on the sidelines of an oil conference.