Kuwaiti oil firm in buying mode

International investment arm of Kuwait Petroleum Company on an urgent global hunt for corporate acquisitions and oil producing assets.

DUBAI // Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company, or KUFPEC, the international investment arm of Kuwait Petroleum Company (KPC) is on an urgent global hunt for corporate acquisitions and oil-producing assets, and it is not too picky about what to buy. Charged by KPC with nearly doubling its output by next year, the company was seeking to negotiate one or more substantial deals by the end of this year that would add at least 10,000 barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd) of oil and gas production and 30 million barrels equivalent of reserves, said Shayma Amin, an international business analyst and petroleum engineer with KUFPEC. "KUFPEC has gone into acquisition mode this year," she told an oil conference in Dubai. "Our production targets are very sharp. We need to reach our targets. The only way to do so is by corporate acquisitions." KPC wants the company to produce 100,000 boepd by year, up from 55,000 boepd currently, and to boost its reserves to 420 million barrels from 240 million barrels. The national Kuwaiti oil company has set longer term targets for its subsidiary of 200,000 boepd of output and 680 million barrels of reserves by 2020, Ms Amin said. On the sidelines of the conference, Ms Amin said she was not authorised to comment on the value of KUFPEC's potential acquisitions, but with backing from KPC, financing should not be a problem. While KUFPEC would prefer to form investment partnerships, it would also consider taking on new projects alone, she said. The company's search for assets is not focused on any particular region, and any mix of oil and gas production would be considered, even heavy oil which would be a new operational area for KUFPEC. "KPC has mandated us to start looking into heavy oil," Ms Amin said. "We plan to move into it, as early as this year. For guaranteeing our future, it is important to diversify. "We are opportunistic. We are looking globally." Heavy oil requires more processing than lighter grades of crude, and is also more difficult and costly to pump. For those reasons, it usually trades at a discount to the benchmark international crudes, making the economics of heavy oil projects especially vulnerable to oil-price declines. But oil companies around the world have embraced heavy oil development in recent years, as light crude supplies have dwindled. In the current market such assets are the first that financially distressed oil producers are likely to jettison. KUFPEC is not the only company seeking bargains in the sector, which includes oil sands operations in countries such as Canada and Venezuela. Total, the French oil company, last month launched a hostile takeover offer for the Canadian oil sands producer UTS Energy. Abu Dhabi National Energy Company, or Taqa, is also reportedly evaluating potential Canadian oil sands acquisitions. Other Gulf-region energy companies seeking to bolster their assets during the downturn include Kuwait's privately held GPX International and Dragon Oil, a company controlled by the government of Dubai that produces oil in Turkmenistan. "I think it is a very good time for us to evaluate the opportunities," Abdullatif Altourah, the chairman of GPX, told the conference. The company was looking for gas-producing assets in Egypt and Tunisia, he said. Abdul al Khalifa, the chief executive of Dragon, said he was seeking partnerships to expand Dragon's operations beyond Turkmenistan. [e-mail]