The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) is looking to form partnerships with companies from the United States to develop unconventional oil resources in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Reuters quoted ADNOC’s chief executive, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, as saying on Tuesday.
The UAE, one of the large producers in OPEC, is looking to boost its production capacity and eventually, its crude oil production, when the OPEC+ output cuts end.
Last November, Abu Dhabi’s Supreme Petroleum Council said that the emirate had increased its total oil reserves by 2 billion barrels to 107 billion barrels thanks to new discoveries. The council also announced Abu Dhabi had 22 billion barrels of unconventional oil reserves to date, again thanks to new discoveries onshore. This amount is larger than the reserves contained in Abu Dhabi’s fields in development and, according to the Supreme Petroleum Council, could rival the U.S. shale boom.
“Today’s announcement by the SPC of the discovery of recoverable unconventional oil resources demonstrates how ADNOC is efficiently expediting the exploration and development of Abu Dhabi’s unconventional resources and marks a major milestone as the nation’s unconventional industry evolves,” Al Jaber said at the time.
A few days after that, ADNOC said it had awarded a contract worth up to US$519 million (AED 1.9 billion) to further expand the scope of what it says is the world’s largest combined three-dimensional (3D) onshore and offshore seismic survey, currently taking place in Abu Dhabi.
The award “further demonstrates ADNOC’s commitment to realizing the full potential of our conventional and unconventional oil and gas resources to ensure the UAE remains a long-term and reliable energy provider to the world,” Yaser Saeed Al Mazrouei, ADNOC Upstream Executive Director, said at the end of November.
Last month, ADNOC signed a collaboration agreement with U.S. supermajor ExxonMobil to explore joint technology research and development (R&D) partnership opportunities in upstream oil and gas, with initial areas including advanced non-metallic solutions, field testing and integrity management, smart reservoir management and well monitoring systems, and innovative emergency response systems.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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