Oman’s state-owned oil giant Petroleum Development Oman (PDO) has been producing 1.28mn barrels of oil equivalent per day (boepd), its managing director exclusively told Oil & Gas Middle East.
“Early monetisation of prospects, improved project delivery and drilling improvements have led so far to a barrel of oil equivalent production of around 1.28mn barrels per day (oil, gas and condensates),” Raoul Restucci revealed, adding that the oil producer’s fully audited figures for 2015 will be announced at the Omani Ministry of Oil and Gas media briefing in Q1 next year.
In addition, PDO is working to a long-term oil production plateau of 600,000 bpd by 2019, Restucci said.
Apart from PDO’s pathbreaking Miraah enhanced oil recovery (EOR) project with GlassPoint Solar, PDO also started or improved upon its existing projects in 2015.
“Work on PDO’s mega projects at Rabab Harweel and Yibal Khuff continues, with foundations being laid at the former and ground-breaking expected on the latter soon,” Restucci said.
PDO also reached the Final Investment Decision phase for its key gas installations: The Kauther Depletion Compression 2 and Saih Nihayda Depletion Compression 2 projects.
Asked about how PDO has been impacted by the declining oil prices, Restucci said, “We are aiming to stay the course on our main activities with a continued focus on business improvement and sustainability. Our well engineering and project activity levels continue to grow and we are pursuing early monetisation of prospects.”
Restucci conceded that the oil giant’s revenues have declined this year due to the low oil prices, adding however that the enterprise has been able to withstand the financial crunch.
“Revenues are obviously significantly down but our development activities continue at a significant pace and remain economically robust. In periods of difficulty and uncertainty, it’s key to get the fundamentals right and our track record and robust business plan have enabled us to absorb the impact of the price fall and continue to deliver key growth and development targets to our shareholders,” he said.
“At the same time, we are relentlessly pursuing stricter cost control and have identified a number of great opportunities to execute work more efficiently and reduce waste. The current environment is enabling us to challenge the status quo. From discretionary expenditure to redeployment of hoists and other resources, we need to ‘serve Oman’ by ensuring we are all working to remove inefficiency and waste,” he said.
