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Wire services
El Universal
January 31, 2006
For more than a quarter of a century, the cluster of platforms off
southern Mexico´s Gulf coast has been the main source of the country´s
vast oil exports, providing about 35 percent of the government´s annual
revenue.
Cantarell, as the oil field is known, is the world´s third biggest and
responsible for about 60 percent of the 3.4 million barrels Mexico
produces each day. The oil has been cheap to extract. Whereas many of
the world´s important reserves are thousands of meters below ground in
geologically challenging and climatically harsh environments, the
deepest well at Cantarell is barely 60 meters.
"For the past generation we have been living a delicious dream," says a
spokesperson at the investor relations department of Pemex, the
state-owned and run oil monopoly. Unfortunately for Mexico, that dream
could end with a jolt. This year, production at Cantarell will fall -
Pemex says about 6 percent - for the first time since it reached an
all-time high of 2 million barrels a day.
After a recent trip to Mexico, Paul Sankey, an analyst at Deutsche Bank,
said: "Cantarell field provided a microcosm for the problems of global
oil - peaking supply, subsidized demand growing rampantly, a history of
state ownership and upcoming elections muddying the outlook for investment."
On the surface, Pemex does not seem overly worried. Last month it
predicted that Cantarell´s decline would be relatively smooth, with
estimated production in 2008 of 1.4 million barrels a day compared with
1.9 million a day this year. At the same time, says the company, other
fields such as Ju-Maloob-Zaap and the Bermúdez complex "will compensate
for the decline in production at Cantarell".
But David Shields, an expert on the nation´s oil industry, says that
that relatively benign scenario is the most optimistic of Pemex´s
forecasts, and is certainly not the most likely. Citing a recent Pemex
study, Shields claims a much more probable outcome is that Cantarell´s
treasured production "collapses" within the next three years to just
one-quarter of what it is today. "The accounts that Pemex will hand over
to the new government at the end of this year are not exactly what you
would call stellar," he says.
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http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/miami/16805.html
