petroleumworld

After all most two years and couple of date lines rolled forward, the project to produce from Venezuela's Orinoco Carabobo area 7 blocks, a million barrels per day of crude oil, of the 20 billions of extra heavy oil crude reserves and with the construction of three upgrades to have a production capacity of converting one million of 8 grade API barrels per day in to 32 API crude, ended up very disappointing for PDVSA. Yesterday, Only Chevron and Repsol with smaller's partners submitted bids to get a piece of the action. Total a major player in Venezuela's heavy oil with its predominant up grader technology and partner at present with PDVSA in a JV that produces 250.000 barrel per day of 32 API crude, did not participate. Total suffer a set back last week when its offer for a JV with PDVSA in another block of Orinoco belt area was rejected by the government. But the set back goes further, neither Russian or the Chinese companies, at present major players in Venezuela came forward and made a bid in the auction. Brazil's Petrobras with its nation's government with lots of affinity with the Venezuelan government was never interested, they have been heard saying, at present Venezuelans tend to confuse politics and business. and for them business is business. They actually have only minors holdings in the country, all acquire trough its Perez Companc acquisition few years back except an offshore gas licence they are trying to get out of it, they already transfer the operation to another partner. Other players with Venezuela operations, like Statoil, BP, and Shell, were at the end not interested, it look like the conditions were not all right, to many imponderables, so they prefer to look at the bulls from outside the ring. However, at present in Venezuela anything is possible and things can turn around one way or the other, so we have to wait and see what PDVSA will do with the offers and what at the end is the result of the whole deal, next month we should know .

Is an independent journalist effort from Petroleumworld, on Inside, Confidential and Off The Record Information, its views are not necessarily those of Petroleumworld - Send Us Your Issues

Legal information: Copyright/Disclaimer

Copyright© 1999-2010 respective author or news agency. All rights reserved.

We welcome the use of Petroleumworld™ stories by anyone provided it mentions Petroleumworld.com as the source. Other stories you have to get authorization by its authors.

Your feedback is important to us!

We invite all our readers to share with us
their views and comments about this article.

Any question or suggestions, please write to:
editor@petroleumworld.com

Best Viewed with IE 5.01+
Windows NT 4.0, '95, '98 and ME +/ 800x600 pixels