NAMI News
The latest trinational news.Friday, May 08, 2009
With Easy Oil Gone, Pemex Sobers Up
Forbes, May 8, 2009 - “After coasting through the ‘80s and ‘90s, the Mexican national oil company is playing catch up to develop the ability to operate in deep water. Thirty years ago, a fisherman saw an oil slick in the shallow waters off the coast of Mexico. The discovery would lead to one of the largest crude reservoirs in the world and a party keg for an impoverished country. Production at Cantarell, as it was named after the fisherman, peaked at more than 2 million barrels of oil a day in 2004 and then began to fall sharply. It is expected to bottom out in three or four years, perhaps between 300,000 and 600,000 barrels a day. Cantarell’s decline has marked the end of an era of easy oil for Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, as the state oil giant is called. Needless to say, Pemex needs to stabilize production, which today stands at 2.7 million barrels of oil a day, down from 3.3 million at its peak. The company, however, is realizing how soft its hands became by coasting through the late 1980s and 1990s, not investing enough in exploration, particularly in deep waters, where the future growth of Pemex rests. “That was not the correct strategy,” Carlos Morales Gil, Pemex’s director of exploration and production, said during a speech here Wednesday at the Offshore Technology Conference. “We cannot stay dependent on one single reservoir anymore, even if it’s very good. That is something that we have to keep in mind every day that we wake up.” It’s impossible not to.” Read More.
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