Page 15 - LatAmOil Week 27

LatAmOil VENEZUEL A LatAmOil

Venezuela received five cargoes of Iranian gasoline in May and June (Image: Venezuelan government)
Washington has sanctioned Tehran over its changing documents about the tankers to evade
nuclear programme, ballistic missiles and influ- US sanctions.
ence across the Middle East. Iranian officials The lawsuit reportedly states that since Sep-
insist, though, that the nuclear programme is tember 2018 Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard
for peaceful purposes. Corps’ (IRGC’s) elite Quds Force has moved oil
Zia Faruqui and two other assistant US attor- through a sanctioned shipping network involv-
neys allege that Iranian businessman Mahmoud ing dozens of ship managers, vessels and facili-
Madanipour helped arrange the shipments by tators. ™

PERU
Peruvian oil output slides

for fourth straight month

OIL production in Peru fell for a fourth consecu- according to Perupetro.
tive month in June, as the coronavirus (COVID- The agency also noted that no development,
19) pandemic continued to wreak havoc on confirmation or injection wells were either
production in the country. Newly released data underway or completed last month. Addition-
show that the country extracted 29,940 barrels ally, no exploration wells were in progress, it
per day (bpd) last month, down by 5% on the said.
May figure, according to Perupetro, the national The decline in domestic yields represents
oil and gas licensing authority. a major blow for the Latin American country,
Perupetro said that a number of blocks still which had been reaching its production targets
remained closed in Peru, owing to the pan- in the months preceding the outbreak. Peru saw
demic. The list of idle sites includes Blocks 8, 67, crude production hit 63,738 bpd last Novem-
192, 95, Z-1 and Z-2, all of which yielded no oil ber, the highest level in five years and 31% over
at all in June. But Block X produced 12,784 bpd the figure reported for the same month of 2018.
last month, making it the main source of crude. Most of the additional barrels came from the
Meanwhile, Peru saw natural gas production Loreto block in the Amazon region and from
reached 23.5mn cubic metres per day in June, offshore fields in the Tumbes Basin.
equivalent to 705 mcm for the whole month. The The government hopes to bring produc-
daily average was slightly lower than the figure of tion levels up to 100,000 bpd. Output has been
23.9 mcm per day reported for May, equivalent declining since the 1990s, and production is cur-
to 740.9 mcm for the whole month. It was also rently only around one quarter of what it was in
significantly lower than the June 2019 figure of the 1980s.
36.8 mcm per day, equivalent to 1.104bn cubic Peru has significant proven oil and gas
metres for the whole month. reserves, both in the north-west and in the
Block 88 accounted for more than 60% of Amazon. Even so, it imports about $5bn worth
Peruvian gas production in the month of June, of refined fuels each year. ™

Week 27 09•July•2020 www. NEWSBASE .com P15