Page 11 - LatAmOil Week 01 2020

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The two firms signed a sales and purchase agree- ment (SPA) last April, under which the Malay- sian firm agreed to fork over $1.29bn for the stake. Petrobras retains a 50% interest in both assets and will continue to operate the fields.
The deal’s closure comes just two months after PPBL won three offshore exploration blocks in the Campos Basin – CM 661, CM 715 and CM 541. The company owns 100% of CM 661andCM715aswellas20%ofCM541.It bid for the last block as part of a consortium that includes French major Total and Qatar Petro- leum, which each own 40% of the acreage.
The Total-led consortium agreed to pay BRL4.03bn ($1bn) for CM 541, which adjoins a pre-salt area and is believed to enjoy similar geology.
The mature Campos Basin, which has been in production since the 1980s, is Brazil’s most prolific basin. The country’s exploration focus, however, has shifted to Santos Basin’s pre-salt discoveries over the past couple of decades. As such, more attention is being paid to finding similar plays in the Campos.
Petronas’ other ventures in Brazil include its lubricants business, Petronas Lubrificantes Brasil, as well as logistics operations through subsidiary MISC.
The Malaysian major also noted that it had signed four new production-sharing contracts (PSCs) in Malaysia and two in Gabon and had also acquired two offshore blocks in Egypt. It said these efforts were in line with its strategy to secure opportunities in prolific basins.agree. ™
New crude oil spill reported on Brazil’s north-eastern coast
NEW crude oil slicks were recently spotted in the state of Ceará in north-eastern Brazil, around two months after the region was hit by another major spill.
The Brazilian navy has said that it intends to send samples of the new spill to a marine studies institute for analysis. In the meantime, a group that includes sailors, volunteers, members of the environmental agency IBAMA and others is recovering the oil traces from the beaches.
“There was a lot of oil in the beaches in the morning. It seems to be more than we saw the first time that this happened, in early Novem- ber,” Helena Soares, who works with community tourism in the area, was quoted by Reuters as saying.
The last spill affected hundreds of beaches in the same region between September and November and left a long stretch of Bra- zil’s coastline spanning nine states polluted. The source of the slick remains the subject of speculation.
The Brazilian environment ministry has said that the oil is not Brazilian and that testing shows that it is “very likely” to be from Vene- zuela, according to local reports. For its part, Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras has said it has narrowed down the crude’s origins to three Venezuelan oilfields.
The Venezuelan government has denied involvement in the last spill, but Brazilian spe- cialists have defended the claim. “Compared with oils from our ‘oil bank,’ there is strong similarity with oil produced in the Venezuelan petroleum basin,” Olívia Maria Cordeiro de Oliveira, a scientist at the Federal University of Bahia, told the BBC.
So far, Brazilian laboratories have carried out most of the testing. But samples of the crude have also been sent for analysis to laboratories in the US as well as in France and Norway, and the results are due soon.
Most of Venezuela’s oil exports go to Asia, following a route that takes ships close to the area of Brazil’s coastline affected by the spill. Brazilian authorities claim to have identified a Greek-flagged ship that was carrying Venezue- lan crude at the time of the September spill.™
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North-eastern Brazil was hit by another oil spill last September (Photo: EPA/Brazil)
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