ISLAMABAD, September 3, 2026: Federal Minister for Petroleum Ali Pervaiz Malik met with a delegation from Gulf Petroleum Exploration Pakistan (GPXP) in Islamabad on Wednesday, where the Kuwaiti company laid out plans to grow its footprint in the country's exploration and energy sectors.

The delegation included GPXP CEO Khaled Al Saati and Mosleh Al Otaibi of Gulf Petroleum Exploration. The conversation centered on the company's current operations in Pakistan and where it wants to take its investment from here.

Malik welcomed the interest and told the delegation the government would keep backing GPXP's existing work as well as whatever expansion comes next. He also used the meeting to talk up the wider relationship between Pakistan and Kuwait, calling the two countries brothers and pointing to the decades the two have already spent working together on energy.

For their part, Al Saati and Al Otaibi thanked the government for its support so far and said GPXP intends to keep growing what it puts into the country.

GPXP is part of the Kuwait based GPX International group, which has held stakes in exploration blocks across Pakistan for years, including acreage in the Badin area of Sindh. Like most foreign operators here, its work involves the slow, capital heavy business of hunting for oil and gas: seismic surveys, exploratory wells, and years of drilling before a find turns into real production.

The meeting is also part of a bigger pattern. Malik has spent much of 2026 trying to pull Gulf money back into Pakistan's upstream sector. In July, he met a delegation from KUFPEC, Kuwait's state exploration arm, which has put roughly a billion dollars into Pakistani gas fields like Qadirpur and Zamzama since the late 1980s and was looking to expand further. In May, the government wrapped up its first offshore licensing round in almost two decades, handing out 23 blocks in the Indus and Makran basins to companies including Mari Energies, OGDCL and PPL, a round officials say could eventually draw in close to a billion dollars if exploration turns into drilling. And at an energy conference in August, Malik told investors bluntly that what the sector needs most is policy that doesn't keep shifting under their feet, so companies can commit money over the long term and reinvest what they earn.

Pakistan's pitch to firms like GPXP fits into that same story: a country that imports a large share of its fuel and wants to change that by getting more wells drilled, and a government trying to convince foreign operators, particularly from the Gulf, that this is a good decade to bet on Pakistani energy.

Whether GPXP's expansion plans translate into new wells or new licenses is still to be worked out. For now, Wednesday's meeting was mostly a statement of intent from both sides, with the details of investment expected to follow.