Page 14 - LatAmOil Week 28 2020

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Open-season offers could come from the states of Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul, Paraná, São Paulo and Santa Catarina, he noted.
e 3,150-km Gasbol pipeline is the longest in South America. It runs from Rio Grande in southern Bolivia to south-eastern Brazil.
Petrobras, the national oil company (NOC) of Brazil, used to be the only user of the pipeline. Last year, though, it began to shed its monopoly control over gas distribution and opened the
sector up to other companies through asset sales and other measures. As part of that strategy, Petrobras signed an agreement in March with YPFB, its Bolivian counterpart, to reduce its gas o ake from 30 mcm per day to 20 mcm per day. It did so with the intent of allowing YPFB to sell its gas directly to other clients in Brazil.
Bolivia is the largest producer of gas in South America. It exports nearly 70% of its gas output to Argentina and Brazil via pipeline. But it has struggled to nd new markets in recent years.™
IOCs said to be mulling bids for Brazil’s offshore Golfinho cluster
AS Brazil’s national oil company (NOC) Petro- bras moves forward with plans to sell the Golf- inho cluster, a group of o shore oil elds, it is on track to receive bids from several international oil companies (IOCs), including the Norwe- gian rms BW O shore and DBO Energy, two sources told Reuters last week.
According to the sources, potential investors are due to submit binding o ers for the Gol nho cluster to state-controlled Petrobras in early September. As of press time, though, neither Petrobras nor the Norwegian companies had commented on the matter.
e Gol nho cluster, located o the coast of the south-eastern state of Espirito Santo, is one of the largest production assets owned by Brazil’s national oil company (NOC) Petrobras. It con- sists of mature elds that yield 15,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil and 750,000 cubic metres per day of natural gas on average.
With the sale, Petrobras is trying to restart its asset divestment programme following the crash in oil prices earlier in the year. e NOC has been trying to pay down debt and recover from the Lava Jato (“Clean Hands”) corruption scandal by divesting non-core assets and focus- ing on upstream development of its deepwater pre-salt elds.
Last December, Petrobras said it was plan- ning to sell $20-30bn worth of assets, including eight re neries, between 2020 and 2024. e company has also said it may sell sections of Marlim, one of Brazil’s largest oil elds, along with its majority stake in the smaller Papa-Terra eld and other assets. It has estimated that the additional sell-o s and other cost-cutting meas- ures will boost its equity value by roughly 45% by 2021.
Since the roll-out of these initiatives, though, the decline of oil prices and the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic have forced Petrobras to slow the divestment process.
The NOC is still planning to focus on upstream projects, though. It has said it will concentrate spending on the o shore pre-salt formation during the 2020-2024 period, with a special emphasis on the Búzios eld. is o - shore site, formerly known as Franco, is located within the Cessão Onerosa (Transfer of Rights) region in the Santos Basin.
Búzios began producing oil in April 2018 and became Brazil’s second-biggest single source of oil and gas last September. In that month, it saw output reach 327,828 bpd, according to data from the National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP).
The Golfinho cluster yields about 15,000 bpd of oil (Image: Petrobras)
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w w w . N E W S B A S E . c o m Week 28 16•July•2020