While Port of Brownsville administrators say things will pick up with what they hope will be the eventual 2018 opening of a proposed liquefied gas plant in Brownsville, Mexican media outlets are reporting that two giant state-of-the art offshore drilling rigs are due to arrive any day 135 miles off shore Brownsville to drill for PEMEX.
The West Pegasus and the Bicentenario drilling platforms are accompanied by company helicopters that are located at the Matamoros airport.
The enterprise carries a $1 billion dollar budget to explore in deep water in Mexican side of the Perdido field. These are newly built, state of the art, deep water drilling vessels. The hundreds of workers that will man these rigs will be resupplied from distant Tampico, at great expense. News reports also indicate that Pemex will start drilling three exploratory wells on the marine boundaries bordering the United States as soon as next month – February 2012 – in the area known as the Perdido Fold Belt in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
Carlos Morales Gil, director of Pemex Exploracion y Produccion (PEP) [Pemex Exploration and Production], told El Universal that if crude petroleum is found on the Mexican side in an area of more than 12,000 square kilometers, "the treaty on cross-border deposits will have to be negotiated in order to regulate the exploitation of the resources that are found."
He explained that the negotiation is called for because companies like Shell and its partners have already been exploiting deposits on the US side since 2010 for the purpose of extracting 130,000 barrels of crude per day.
Pemex will set up the Bicentenario and West Pegasus platforms in this area, since this is drilling equipment with capabilities to operate in water depths of up to 10,000 meters, and it would allow the Mexican government to confirm the most important find of crude and gas of the past few decades.
The Mexican state petroleum company estimates a potential of 3 billion barrels of crude, equivalent to 21 percent of Mexico's current proven reserves of crude.
Morales Gil commented that if the existence of the reserves is confirmed the financial requirements for developing and exploiting the resources, the investment may rise to $10 billion in a period of five years.
The Perdido Fold Belt is a southward continuation of US production provinces that cross the marine borders or to the north of Mexico's deposits, according to the Mexican government's view. The studies conducted in the two countries show that "the Hammerhead well, which is located on the US side, connects with the Magnanimo deposit in Mexico, and the Trident extends to national territory to Alaminos, wells that are located in water depths of 2,800 and 3,100 meters and where the petroleum strata are located another 4,500 or 5,800 meters below the bottom of the sea."
So far, an estimated 1,200 wells have been drilled in the region, while on the Mexican side – toward the south of Mexico – the figure reaches a mere 14, excluding those that will have to be drilled in Perdido.
Industry sources indicate that it took Chevron and Shell eight years to develop the Great White-Silvertip-Tobago field discovered in March 2002 and which in March 2010 gave them the first production, which could reach 130,000 barrels per day in the next few years, according to information that the oil companies presented on their web sites.
The prospective resource identified to date by Pemex varies in a range from 500 milion to 3 billion barrels of crude oil equivalent. This area is considered as one of the most attractive in the search for light oil in deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, part of which Mexico and the United States share.
Of the total potential of the Mexico-US marine production region, 70 percent belong to Mexico and the rest has been licensed to multinational firms from the United States side.
The PEP director said that this would be the most important discovery in many years, since the potential of productive resources that may be obtained in the region is equivalent to 3.2 years of production at the current rates of extraction.
5 comments:
We should look at this as good news for our area....and for the Port of Brownsville. Let's hope the spillover of money and oil is more satisfying than the spillover of drugs and violence. With our record on this side....the city, the port, et al, we will find a way to screw this up too.
You not only scooped the Herald, but also all the Port Brownsville guru's who obviously new nothing about a billion bucks being invested in the area.
Nothing from the Port because there was no way to steal from this or stuff a brother-in-law into the deal.
I know that is not that big of a deal, but the image posted of the drilling rig is a "jack-up" rig, this not the type of rig that is used to drill in 1000' feet of water. Also "drilling platforms" are stationary rigs that are used to produce oil and gas after it has been determined that it is profitable enough to continue production.
Deep water drilling is cutting edge technology, it is difficult, expensive and dangerous. I hope that PEMEX has thier shit together better that BP.
BP had redundant layers of safety both on the rig and in Houston. People were the key elements of these redundant layers and they all failed at once time. Lets hope PEMEX has somebody with the balls to push the red button and stop the rig, before it all goes to hell. BP did not. No body wanted to take the responsibility to shut down the rig with all the cost that goes with that, so they all analized and re-analized the data coming in and waited to long locked down in the paralaysis an analysis.
Let's hope there is a real macho within easy reach of PEXMEX's red button.
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