Financial Time: Gas: Bottlenecks impede the development of supplies

It is one of the ironies of the Middle East energy sector that Kuwait, a country with 1 per cent of global natural gas reserves has to import the stuff.

Since 2009, it has been receiving cargoes of liquefied natural gas from as far afield as Russia, Australia and Trinidad at a $150m floating terminal in the waters of the Gulf. And its LNG imports are set to grow in the coming years, officials say.

Yet this is a country that in 2006 made one of the largest gas discoveries of recent years – the vast “Jurassic” fields of Sabriya and Umm Niga.

Kuwait offers the “contradiction of a country apparently unable to commercialise its substantial reserves”, the Oxford Institute of Energy Studies (OIES) said in a recent book. With limited ability to increase production, it said, Kuwait faced “a potentially gaping hole in its gas balance”.  MORE (registration required)