Kuwait will drill for crude oil and natural gas in Vietnam next year, Bloomberg said Thursday in an online news report. The drilling will be done by Kuwait Foreign Petroleum Exploration Company, a unit of state-run Kuwait Petroleum Corp., the report said. Bloomberg said the company will also look for shale gas joint venture with the US. The company has had three blocks in Vietnam since 2009 and will start drilling the first exploration wells there next year, Bloomberg said, quoting Ali Al-Shammari, deputy chairman of the Kuwait City-based explorer known as Kufpec. The company is also looking for opportunities in North and South America along with Europe as it plans to boost the number of fields it operates outside Kuwait, he added. Kufpec seeks to produce 200,000 barrels of oil equivalent from abroad by 2020, according to Al-Shammari. “Most of this addition will come from new joint ventures,” he said. Australia is a major focus for now for Kufpec, he said. The company owns 35 percent in a bloc in the West Area of Australia's North shelf, where it produces natural gas from two fields along with its partner Apache Corp., which owns the rest of the block, he said.
