Pemex looks for more efficiency

Petroleos Mexicanos, the third-biggest oil supplier to the U.S., must improve its operating capabilities and expand into new production areas, such as deepwater, to curb its dependence on the Cantarell oil field, said the company’s head of production and exploration.

“Cantarell has made us highly dependent,” said Pemex’s Carlos Morales during a conference last week in the Gulf of Mexico port city of Veracruz. “The solutions we’re going to face in the future are much smaller fields that require much more work and efficiency than we have today.”


Pemex now must learn to handle the higher risks of producing oil in Gulf of Mexico waters more than 1,640 feet deep and tapping thousands of pockets of oil in the rugged terrain of southeastern Mexico known as Chicontepec as Cantarell declines at a rate of more than 15 percent this year, Morales said.

Cantarell, the world’s third-largest oil field, caused Mexico’s oil industry to boom when it first began pumping in 1979. The offshore field also caused complacency, Morales said.

Petroleum World