Because of the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Commissioning of Kuwait's long-delayed 615,000 b/d al-Zour refinery looks likely to be pushed back once again. Kipic, the state-owned KPC subsidiary that manages operations at the refinery, was scheduled to commission the 3.69 billion Kuwaiti dinar ($12 billion) plant in Q4 this year. Progress at the project was above 95 percent, the company's acting chief executive Hatem al-Awadhi last month said.
Al-Zour will be the largest refinery in the Middle East and will bring Kuwait's total refining capacity to 1.415 million b/d, from around 800,000 b/d. It has been designed to process domestic heavy crude. However, an insistence by several service companies and contractors working on the mega-project to invoke force majeure on account of the pandemic has thrown this into serious doubt.
Kuwait introduced restrictions on air travel and land movement in mid-March. Last week, the country said that it will begin to resume commercial passenger flights on 1 August, as part of a five-phase plan to "return to normalcy" by mid-September.
