PNZ gas project sparks Tehran’s ire

Kuwait and Saudi Arabia’s domestic scarcity has driven the formal revival of longstanding plans to tap the shared Dorra field

Iran has lodged immediate objections to Mideast Gulf neighbours Saudi Arabia and Kuwait’s late March revival of a landmark project to develop the Dorra non-associated offshore gas field in the Partitioned Neutral Zone (PNZ)—an area of shared acreage along their common borders. Tehran claims partial sovereignty over the field. With both partners increasingly short of gas and flush with oil revenues, the timing appears propitious for realising plans for the untapped resource, first unearthed some 80 years ago, that date back two decades. The foundations of the latest pact were laid in December 2019, when Kuwait and Saudi Arabia patched up a sovereignty dispute that had forced the closure of th