Teammates: PDVSA joins with Schlumberger on venture.
Schlumberger teams with PDVSA
Texas services giant Schlumberger and Venzuelan state-run PDVSA have agreed to form a joint venture, Venezuelan Oil and Energy Minister Rafael Ramirez said.
“We have a memorandum with Schlumberger to form a joint venture,” Ramirez said today in an interview in Vienna.
The state company’s unpaid invoices to Houston-based Schlumberger are “not a big problem,” he said. He declined to provide further details in a Bloomberg report.
PDVSA started converting production contracts with private companies into joint ventures in 2006. PDVSA owns at least 60% stakes in the ventures.
Joint venture services may include such tasks as cementing wells, hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling and offshore seismic surveys, PDVSA said in a 27 August statement.
Schlumberger sales in Latin America rose 16% to $4.23 billion last year, according to the company’s annual financial statement.
PDVSA is catching up on payments to vendors including service companies, Ramirez said on 6 March. About 56 companies with long-term contracts will have to renegotiate them before they get paid, he said.
Debts outstanding to Schlumberger and Texas outfit Halliburton were a combined $800 million, Dow Jones Newswires reported on 16 January.
Stephen Harris, a spokesman at Schlumberger, didn’t immediately return a call from Bloomberg News seeking comment.