Page 9 - LatAmOil Week 08 2020

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CEO says Ecopetrol will expand drilling in 2020-2022 period
FELIPE Bayon, the CEO of Colombia’s national oil company (NOC) Ecopetrol, has said that his company hopes to step up its drilling activity over the next two years.
During a conference call with investors on February 26, Bayon noted that Ecopetrol had set a goal for itself of drilling 30 new exploration wells each year between 2020 and 2022. This would represent a 50% increase on 2019, when Ecopetrol sank 20 new wells, with a success rate of 40%. But the CEO said the company was aim- ing higher.
“We are working on having an inventory of potential exploration prospects that is much greater than [the goal of] 30,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters during the call, which focused on the NOC’s newly released earnings report for 2019. “It could be 40 or 45 wells [per year].”
He also noted that the company had drilled more extensively than planned last year, sinking 20 wells when it was scheduled to drill only 12, and hoped to remain active on this front. “We have been more proactive every time from the point of view of exploration,” he said. “Last year we had a lot of success in the bidding process for [exploration and production] areas. We will keep working on that.”
Ecopetrol will focus on highly prospective domestic and international prospects in its 2020-2022 drilling campaign, he added. “We will not be cautious from the point of view of
MEXICO
Pemex reports major onshore oil discovery at Kuxum
exploration,” he remarked.
Bayon also highlighted the company’s suc-
cess in the area of reserve replacement. Ecopet- rol’s reserve replacement ratio came to 169% in 2019, the highest figure recorded in the last nine years, he said. He attributed the company’s achievements on this front to exploration ini- tiatives and improved recovery rates at mature fields.
The CEO also said that the 2019 earnings report demonstrated the success of Ecopetrol’s commercial strategy for selling its heavy crude oil production. He explained that the company had earned a net profit of $3.87bn last year, marking a 14.7% rise on the 2018 figure.™
Argentina froze natural gas prices in the hope of curbing inflation (Photo: YPF)
PEMEX, the national oil company (NOC) of Mexico, has reportedly discovered a huge new deposit of crude oil and natural gas in Veracruz State.
Sources inside the state-owned firm told El Universal last week that the onshore field, known as Kuxum, might hold as much as 5bn barrels of oil equivalent (boe). This would make it even larger than Zama, the shallow-water offshore site where Talos Energy (US) found 700mn barrels in 2015, they said.
According to the sources, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, Kuxum covers a large area in Veracruz and is about 200 km long. The field’s reserves are about equally divided between oil and gas, they said.
El Universal’s sources did not say when Pemex might begin developing the new field or whether the NOC intended to work with any foreign partners. But they did assert that the dis- covery of this size had the potential to improve Pemex’s financial position. The company has a heavy debt load, and its oil output has been declining for more than 10 years.
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