Kuwait plans to produce more than 4 billion cubic feet per day (cfd) of gas by 2030, a top executive at state-owned Kuwait Oil Co (KOC) said on Tuesday, nearly quadruple current output.

The state does not have enough natural gas to meet power demand and burns a large volume of oil products at power stations. Like its oil exporting neighbours, Kuwait has been slow to develop its gas reserves to meet domestic demand.

Kuwait's pumps around 1 billion cfd of gas from oilfields, and 145 million cfd from gas fields not associated with oil.

The 4 billion cfd target would include a huge rise in non-associated gas output to 2.7 billion cfd, Mohammad Husain, deputy managing director for planning and gas at KOC, said in a presentation to an industry event.

The non-associated gas would come from the neutral zone the country shares with neighbour Saudi Arabia and from fields within Kuwait, he said.

It included output from the Dorra field, Husain said. But that field is shared with Iran and has been a bone of contention between Kuwait and Tehran since the 1960s, and the two have yet to strike a deal on how to develop it.

Kuwait is plugging the gap between supply and demand with imports of liquefied natural gas (LNG).
 Tight supply has been exacerbated by Opec-member Kuwait's adherence to the producer group's oil output restrictions since late 2008. As most of Kuwait's gas is a by-product of oil production, when it pumps less crude, it pumps less gas.

To counter this constraint, Kuwait is working on a scheme to increase output of non-associated gas fields to 1 billion cfd by 2016.   

In February, state-run Kuwait Oil Company signed a five-year service contract with Royal Dutch Shell to develop gas fields in the country's north.-Reuters