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United Arab Emirates
Index
The Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) held a concession for
Dubayy
from 1937 to 1961. CFP and Compañía Española de Petróleo
(Spanish
Petroleum Company--Hispanoil) obtained an onshore
concession in
1954 and formed Dubai Marine Areas (Duma). Continental Oil
Company acquired the IPC concession in 1963 and formed the
Dubai
Petroleum Company (DPC). That same year, DPC acquired 50
percent
of Duma and released some of its shares to other
companies. Oil
was discovered offshore in 1966, and production commenced
in late
1969. The Dubayy government acquired a 60 percent share in
DumaDPC in 1975.
Dubayy's oil reserves in 1991 were estimated at 4
billion
barrels, which will run out by 2016 if 1990 levels of
production
continue. Dubayy's production policy has been to ignore
OPEC
quotas for the most part, concentrating on exploiting the
amirate's fields as efficiently as possible. This has
meant
producing at or near capacity most of the time. The
principal
fields are Fath, Rashid, and Falah offshore, and Margham
onshore.
The amirate has two refineries, with a third planned for
the mid1990s .
The Dubayy government established the Dubai Natural Gas
Company (Dugas) in 1975 to process gas from offshore oil
fields.
By the early 1990s, the company also planned to process
associated gas from the onshore Margham field. Dugas's
foreign
partner was Scimitar Oils (Dubai), a subsidiary of
Canada's
Sunningdale Oils. The Dugas processing facilities at Mina
Jabal
Ali came on-line in 1980 with a capacity of 20,000 bpd of
natural
gas liquids (propane, butane, and heavier liquids) and 2.1
million cubic meters of dry gas (methane) a day. The dry
gas is
piped to the Dubai Aluminum Company (Dubal), where it
fuels a
large electric power and desalination plant. A small part
of the
natural gas liquids is locally bottled and consumed, but
most is
exported to Japan. A special gas terminal at Mina Jabal
Ali that
can handle tankers of up to 48,000 tons opened in 1980.
The
amirate's gas reserves are estimated at 125 billion cubic
meters.
Data as of January 1993
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