Pemex boss sees steady Cantarell decline
Crude reserves at Mexico's huge but waning Cantarell oilfield will continue to
decline this year at around the same pace as last year, Pemex director
general Jesus Reyes Heroles has said.
Reyes Heroles told Reuters yesterday that average daily production at
Cantarell, in the Gulf of Mexico, would drop by 200,000 barrels over 2008,
increasing pressure on the state-owned oil monopoly to ramp up output at
smaller fields.
The decrease would be a drop of 16% from Cantarell's December 2007 output of
1.26 million barrels per day, its lowest level of the year. Yields at
Cantarell declined 16% during 2007, slightly more than forecast.
Reyes Heroles told an engineering event Pemex aimed to keep its total crude
output at around 3.1 million bpd by increasing production at other fields.
But to maintain that level beyond 2012 would require higher investment over
the next few years.
The Mexican government is raising Pemex's investment budget for 2008 by around
a third to roughly $20 billion, after a $2.8 billion tax cut agreed last
year. Pemex will spend nearly $2 billion on exploration and around $13
billion on production.
Within that, Pemex will pump some $2 billion into Cantarell to seek small
remaining pockets of oil, and will spend more than $1 billion to increase
production at the nearby Ku Maloob Zaap complex, said Vinicio Suro, head of
investment projects at Pemex Exploration and Production.
"It's an important project, we are going upwards, everything's going well,"
Suro told reporters. He said the goal was to raise output at Ku Maloob Zaap
to 780,000 bpd within the next two or three years from roughly 600,000 bpd
today.
Pemex is also working to expand output at Chicontepec, a technically tricky
sprawl of onshore fields.
Mexico is one of the four top oil suppliers to the US, which relies on it as a
politically stable source.
While it grapples with a decline in total output since a 2004 peak, Pemex also
is under pressure to shore up declining crude reserves. It lags behind
foreign oil companies of its size in getting exploration projects going in
deep water.
President Felipe Calderon is keen to attract more private capital to the oil
sector and has lawmakers discussing changing the company’s governing
legislation to allow Pemex form private partnerships in specific areas, such
as cross-border oilfields in the Gulf of Mexico.
Senators from two main parties say they could agree an energy reform during
the February to April congressional session, but they face opposition from
leftists who stand against loosening barriers to private investment in oil.
Cantarell, the former jewel of Mexico's oil industry, accounted for two-thirds
of the country's crude output for years, but now makes up just 43% of the
total.
30 January 2008 00:40 GMT
| last updated:
30 January 2008 07:56 GMT
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