According to the interview of Indrajit Sen with Salim bin Nasser Al Aufi, Undersecretary at the Ministry of Oil and Gas, at arabianindustry website, Oman’s oil production may go down a little bit in 2016, compared to 2015. One main reason for this drop is some planned activities that will take some production away. The focus will be more on activities that have as little impact as possible on production, including one or two rigs that they decided to shelve.
Oil prices have tumbled by over 40% since the start at the year, with brent crude - the global benchmark – presently trading at around $36 a barrel.
Asked if capital expenditure will be cut for 2016 in light of declining oil prices, the official said, “We have already planned in terms of what activities will be executed in 2016. We have reduced the budget to a large extent to the things that we think are very critical and are important for execution.”
“The only thing that probably remains for the companies to do is to go back and revise their own activities and make sure they become a little bit more efficient. But in terms of cutting activities, I think we have already gone past that bridge,” he noted.
Asked what the break-even cost of production for Oman would be, the undersecretary said, “We can go down to as low as it takes. It does not matter because.... ‘shutting in’ is going to cost us more money because you still need to pay for maintenance; you still need to pay for employment and so on.”
