2023-08-03 17:40:55
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August 3, 2023, 17:37 GMT
Last updated 3 hours ago
Saudi Arabia and Kuwait said that they alone own a gas field that Iran claims ownership of.
This escalating step comes following Tehran threatened to continue drilling for gas in the same field.
The offshore field is known as Arash in Iran and Dorra in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and the field has long been a focal point of contention among the three countries.
The Kuwaiti and Saudi authorities said in a joint statement, Thursday, that they alone have absolute sovereignty rights regarding the exploitation of wealth in that region.
Kuwait and Saudi Arabia renewed “previous and repeated calls for Iran to negotiate” on demarcating its maritime borders and resolving that issue, according to a statement published by the official Saudi Press Agency.
Recent attempts to revive negotiations have failed. A few days ago, Iranian Oil Minister Javad Oji said that his country might continue exploration work in the field even without reaching an agreement.
Ochi said: “Iran is pursuing its rights and interests with regard to the exploitation and exploration of the field… if there is no desire for understanding and cooperation,” according to what was quoted by the official Iranian news agency Shana.
Last month, Kuwait invited Iran for another round of talks on maritime borders following Tehran said it was ready to begin exploration in the field.
Over the years, talks between Iran and Kuwait over the disputed maritime border area between the two countries, which are rich in natural gas, have failed.
“unattended”
A few weeks later, Kuwaiti Oil Minister Saad Al-Barrak said that his country would also start “exploration and production” work in the gas field without waiting for a border demarcation agreement with Iran, according to Sky News.
The dispute over the field dates back to the sixties of the last century, when Iran and Kuwait granted the right to offshore exploration to two different companies, and the work of the two companies intersected in the northern part of the field.
The extractable gas reserves from the Dorra / Arch field are estimated at regarding 200 billion cubic meters.
Last year, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia signed a joint agreement to develop the offshore field, despite objections from Iran, which described the agreement as “illegal”.
On the other hand, the British “OilPrice.com” website, which specializes in oil prices, reported that Saudi Arabia “is finding a way to export quantities of oil that are not counted in the official production and export figures.”
This reduces the importance of Riyadh’s commitment to the agreed production cut in the OPEC Plus alliance.
In a recently published report, the specialized website quoted an unnamed, high-ranking official in the European Union as saying, “Saudi Arabia has a long history of doing this, so we are not surprised that it seeks to increase oil sales from additional production from the neutral zone.” [بين المملكة والكويت] Especially since the production of this region is not subject to monitoring or official accounts.
According to the same site, Russia has been “doing the same thing for months.”
There was no comment from Saudi Arabia or Russia on this report.
The neutral zone covers an area of 2,230 square miles. It is estimated that it has oil reserves of 30 billion barrels, in addition to 60 trillion cubic feet of gas.
Oil production from the region’s fields last year reached 175,000 barrels per day, and that production might easily rise to 300,000 barrels per day, or even half a million barrels per day.
According to the agreement between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, the oil revenues from the neutral zone are divided equally between the two countries.
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