Shell Signs Agreement WIth Kuwait To Supply The Country With Natural Gas, A Pressing Requirement For This Nation -- Bloomberg -- December 24, 2017

Of the ten world's biggest natural gas reserves, four of them are in the Mideast, but then we get this story from Bloomberg via Yahoo!Finance:  Kuwait signs LNG import deal with Shell, has "need for gas."

Kuwait Petroleum Corp. signed a 15-year liquefied natural gas import deal with Royal Dutch Shell Plc to help the oil exporting nation meet growing domestic energy demand.

The sales purchasing agreement with Shell International Trading Middle East Ltd. will start in 2020. Shell has supplied Kuwait with the super-cooled fuel since 2010 and declined to say how much gas is covered under the new contract.

While KPC is working to boost local natural gas production, Kuwait has a “pressing requirement” to secure natural gas supplies in the meantime.

LNG could help meet Kuwait’s domestic demand for power to run air conditioners during hot summer months and cut the amount of crude oil burned instead of exported for profit. The contract will cover 2 million to 3 million metric tons of LNG a year, priced at 11 percent below a Brent benchmark, a person familiar said, asking not to be identified because terms of the deal are private.

This comes on the heels of a story that Saudi Arabia is shopping for shale gas properties in the Permian. And all this time, I thought the Mideast had an inexhaustible supply of oil and natural gas.