Qatar Petroleum CEO Saad Sherida al-Kaabi said that the company plans to expand its oil business over the next few years despite economic embargo on Qatar's capital Doha, on Tuesday.
The company is aiming to increase its oil production from 4.8m barrels per day to 6.5m barrels per day over the next eight years.
Al-Kaabi told Reuters: “We are in Mexico, we are in Brazil, we are contemplating investing in the US in many areas, in shale gas, in conventional oil. We are looking at many things.”
Read more: Oil gushes to four-year high over Iran fears
Qatar is a member of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec), which is a consortium of the world's biggest oil producing nations, and is particularly big within liquefied natural gas (LNG) as it has a production of 77m tonnes per year.
The company owns the majority of the Golden Pass LNG terminal in Texas which it is considering to expand and will make a final decision on whether to go through with the plans or not by the end of the year depending on cost.
Al-Kaabi said: “I'm not in the business of infrastructure. I'm not going to have a liquefaction plant only. It has to be something that will be linked with an upstream business that we would buy in the US so we need to be naturally hedged.”
In June 2017, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt boycotted trade with Qatar which significantly affected the movement of goods within the Middle East, creating the embargo that is still in place today and became commonly known as the Qatar diplomatic crisis.
The boycott came after Qatar would not agree to the demands the other nations proposed, among them cutting all ties with Iran, with whom Qatar shares the world's largest LNG field, and stop all trade not permitted by US sanctions.
Read more: Shell offloads Canadian business for $3.3bn
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