Kuwait says technical issues shut Khafji, not politics

摘要

New York-Technical issues, not politics, were behind Saudi Arabia’s decision to shut the Khafji oil field in the partitioned Neutral Zone shared by the two countries, Kuwaiti oil minister Ali al-Omair said Monday. It was Omair’s first comment on Saudi Arabia’s unilateral closure of the 300,000 b/d field. The shutdown took Kuwait by surprise and exposed a series of underlying difficulties between the two OPEC members cited by local media, analysts and oil industry experts in the past week.