Kuwait to meet with UN for oil project approvals
22 August 2025
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State-owned upstream operator Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) has scheduled a meeting with the UN in the second week of September as it seeks approvals to extend two oil remediation projects.
The contractors involved will be given an additional volume of polluted soil to clean and an extra 18 months in which to complete processing, according to industry sources.
The two Kuwait-based contractors that have been provisionally awarded contract extensions are Khalid Ali Al-Kharafi & Brothers Company and Heisco.
The contract extensions are each worth about $30m and have already been approved by KOC.
They also need approval from the UN as the project is being funded through money that was awarded to Kuwait by the UN Compensation Commission (UNCC) to allow Kuwait to address ecological damage resulting from the 1990-91 Gulf War.
The contract extensions are for contracts that were awarded though the Kuwait Environmental Remediation Programme (Kerp) in 2021.
Kerp is the world’s biggest project to clean up oil pollution.
More than 30 years after the UNCC was created to ensure restitution for Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion of 1990, the reparations body announced in February 2022 that it had processed its final claim, amounting to $52.4bn in total.
Kerp itself is understood to be deploying about $3.5bn of the reparation funds, cleaning up the damage caused by oil spills related to the war.
The project to clean up all of the crude that was spilled as a result of the war stalled for decades due to the unique challenges that the clean-up project poses, but in recent years there has been a surge in activity, with major tenders and contract awards.
The project has been divided into three main project areas, which are known as North Kuwait Excavation Transportation Remediation (NKETR), South Kuwait Excavation Transportation Remediation (SKETR) and South Kuwait Excavation Transportation Remediation 2 (SKETR-2).
The original contracts that were awarded to Khalid Ali Al-Kharafi & Brothers Company and Heisco were:
- NKETR A – Sabria: Kharafi (Kuwait)/Lamor (Finland) – $194m
- SKETR A – Greater Burgan: Kharafi/Lamor – $197m
- SKETR B – Greater Burgan: Heisco (Kuwait) / Zaopin Hangzhou (China) – $185m
The extensions are being added to existing contracts after additional volumes of polluted soil were discovered by Kuwait last year.
In October 2024, MEED revealed that KOC had discovered an extra 5 million tons of contaminated soil.
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