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Venezuela: Orinoco belt

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PDVSA spuds Orinoco belt well

State-run PDVSA has spudded a stratographic well on the Boyaca 6 Block as part of a wide ranging partnership with Portugal's Galp Energia group.

The well is one of many that PDVSA has been drilling with foreign partners in a bid to certify billions of barrels of reserves of extra heavy crude.

In all, 27 blocks have been set aside.

Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez and Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates took part in a ceremony to mark the start of the drilling operation.

PDVSA estimates suggest that the Boyaca 6 Block holds abut 80 billion barrels of oil in place, of which 12 billion barrels are seen as recoverable, applying the recovery rate of 20% to which the Venezuelan company aspires.

Venezuela and Portugal signed a wide-ranging bilateral agreement last week outlining plans to export between 2 million and 4 million barrels of Venezuelan crude per year to Portugal and for Galp to take a 15% stake in the LNG plant and related upstream projects planned by PDVSA

The Venezuela company has said it will build two 4.7 million tonne LNG trains processing gas that will be produced mainly from the Loran field in the Plataforma Deltana region and from the Mariscal Sucre fields in the northern part of the Gulf of Paria.

Galp is expected to provide transport logistics and market up to 2 billion cubic metres of this gas per year, with a scheduled 2014 start-up date.

Other potential partners in the frame are Argentina's state company Enarsa, Loran-operator Chevron and Sonatrach, while supermajor Shell is also understood to have held negotiations over a possible stake in the liquefaction project.

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