by DantesPeak » Fri 28 Sep 2007, 19:25:00
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'R')eport by Esther Arzate: "Excessive Exploitation of Crude Oil, a Challenge That Affects Recovery of Cantarell"
While Mexican Petroleum (Pemex ) Director Jesus Reyes Heroles claims that no financial, human, or technological resources will be spared to turn Cantarell into a model oilfield for exploitation and recovery of oil on a worldwide scale, experts think that the parastate company has over-exploited that deposit and no plan will be able to make up for the drop in oil production from that gigantic field.
Improving oil extraction until reaching a level of at least 50 per cent is one of the Mexican oil company's priorities, because "being such a rich, large deposit, each percentage of recovery means lots of oil," according to the official. Nevertheless, experts claim that the deposit has been over-exploited and that no other deposit will be able to make up for the drop of 150,000 to 200,000 barrels a year that Cantarell will continue to record in the current six-year period.
The recovery of hydrocarbons in fields fluctuates between 25 per cent and 70 per cent, depending on the conditions of the fields, but "the idea is for deposits like Cantarell to be an example of recovery," Reyes Heroles said. He is asked: At what percentage? "We would be getting as close as possible to 50 per cent. We won't know that [percentage] until one day we can say: 'This is how much we got,'" he replied.
In the opinion of the director of the Centre for Economic Studies at the Monterrey Institute of Technology (Monterrey Tech), Leticia Armenta, the Cantarell megafield was over-exploited in recent years by Pemex because of the interest in taking advantage of the high price of oil, which was 21 dollars in 2002 and continued to rise until 2006, when it reached an all-time high of 53 dollars a barrel.
Source: El Financiero website, Mexico City, in Spanish 25 Sep 07
link
[no direct link] Translated to English by BBC International Reports (Latin America) Sep 28, 2007. The article goes on to say that flaring (burning) of natural gas associated with oil production reduced the future recovery of crude oil.
It's already over, now it's just a matter of adjusting.