Heading south of the border: Weatherford at work
Weatherford heeds Chicontepec call
A unit of US drilling and well services company Weatherford International picked up two contracts valued at a total of around $870 million to drill up to 600 wells at Mexico’s Chicontepec oil play.
Weatherford beat out rival proposals for the contracts from global oilfield services giants Schlumberger, Halliburton and Baker Hughes to sink the wells in Puebla and Veracruz states.
Chicontepec, officially known as the Tertiary Gulf Oil Development, is being engineered by Pemex to provide a production bridge until the Mexican state oil company can find new oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico deep-water sector,.
The Weatherford bids for the two contracts came in substantially lower than most of the other proposals, highlighting the highly competitive nature of the tender.
Weatherford could not be reached for comment as to how many rigs it will bring to Mexico for what will be the technically and logistically tough job.
The contracts kick off this summer and will last through the rest of this year and 2009.
Last year, Pemex awarded a $1.4 billion contract to an oilfield services joint venture between Schlumberger and ICA-Fluor to drill wells at Chicontepec over a four-year period.
Despite some hitches in getting the Chicontepec oil to outlets via pipeline, with some of the crude being trucked out in tankers, Pemex expects to tap nearly 70,000 barrels per day from the belt by the end of the year. That compares to recent production estimates of around 30,000 bpd.
At an oil conference in Monterrey last week, Mexico's Energy Minister Georgina Kessel said output would hit 600,000 bpd in 13 years.