Karim Al-Sayed

SLB has marked key milestones in Kuwait, including involvement in the discovery of the Burgan oil field, pioneering the Jurassic gas project with Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), and introducing innovative technologies.

SLB celebrates 85 years in Kuwait. What have been some key milestones during its history?

In 1939, SLB was involved in the discovery of the world’s second-largest oil field in Burgan, and since then, we have been involved in all aspects of the oil and gas sector in Kuwait from the first few wells of exploration to Kuwait’s current position as one of the world’s top 10 oil producers. Kuwait is a swing producer given the amount that it contributes to the global oil and gas market. Our primary work is with the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC), which has been one of SLB’s top 10 customers globally given the scale and the amount of technology that we implement. We have 85 years of a successful partnership that will continue until the last drop of oil in the country and beyond as well.

Can you elaborate on the impact of the Jurassic gas project to SLB?

The Jurassic project is important to Kuwait, KOC, and SLB as it was the country’s biggest and first large-scale gas project. This was the first integrated project of KOC and SLB to be done in both Kuwait and the Middle East. SLB was involved from the start, namely seismic prospecting and exploring. The second-biggest achievement was opening the company’s first digital center in the world in the Jurassic facilities in 2010, which SLB runs in partnership with KOC. Third, this is the first time in Kuwait and for SLB that gas production facilities were done in a build, own, operate, transfer (BOOT) model successfully. These two facilities currently provide 300 million SCF of gas to Jurassic, and KOC is working on expanding that to three more facilities. The Jurassic projects have accomplished many notable world-first milestones, and it will be vital for Kuwait to continue to develop the Jurassic field, through digital operations, more production facilities. Kuwait’s gas requirements will continue to increase to meet its domestic consumption, and the Jurassic projects will be key to deliver these requirements. There are plans to drill new wells and build new facilities and expand production to over 1 billion SCF within the next few years.

How is SLB embracing and approaching innovation?

We have introduced innovative solutions and technologies in mature fields like Saudi, Kuwait, and the UAE to help our clients develop their reservoirs. We have multiple areas of focus in terms of technology to improve operational efficiency and lower costs. In Kuwait, we deployed multiple technologies with KOC, enabling it to produce an additional 10,000bpd just by replacing rigs with some of our technologies such as the Rigless ESP which helped in significant reductions of the costs of logistics and lowering emissions. It also does not require anyone to operate it and can be done remotely. SLB has also deployed a technology called AGORA that uses IoT in Oil & Gas operations. KOC now have the ability to control multiple operations, be they wells or facilities, remotely. This is a new technology that we have piloted here, and now we are aiming at expanding our Digital offerings. This is certainly one of our major three-year plans for the future.

What initiatives is SLB is implementing in the field of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG)?

Every one of us have objectives that include monitoring our emissions facilities and operations scope one, two, and three. For everything we do, we look at the impacts we have on ESG directives. In addition, as part of We have control processes for promotions for our technical and non-technical teams. Our responsibility as the leaders in the company is to educate and train all our teams on sustainability and ESG. For example, our young employees are assigned projects where they will have to research how to lower emissions and outline how their project contributes to ESG initiatives. SLB’s commitment to ESG initiatives will be the prevailing mindset for our future generations.