Page 11 - LatAmOil Week 07 2020
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e group spent $3.8bn on building the Pampa Melchorita facility, which includes a 4.45mn tonne per year (tpy) gas liquefaction plant con- structed by Chicago Bridge & Iron Co. (CBI), as well as a marine terminal built by a consortium known as CDB. ( e CDB group includes Italy’s Saipem, Luxembourg’s Jan de Nul and Brazil’s Odebrecht.)
e Pampa Melchorita complex is also home to a storage depot out tted with two 130,000 cubic metre tanks and a 34-inch (860-mm)
natural gas pipeline. e pipeline handles gas from elds in the Cusco region that are being developed by Spain’s Repsol and Argentina’s NOC YPF. It follows a 408-km route from Chiquintirca, a town in the Ayacucho region, to the LNG plant.
Equity in the Peru LNG project is divided between Hunt Oil, with 50%; SK Energy (South Korea), with 20%; Royal Dutch Shell (UK-Neth- erlands), with 20%, and Marubeni (Japan), with 10%.
ConocoPhillips to begin exploring Vaca Muerta fields this year
ARGENTINA
THE US supermajor ConocoPhilips said last week that it would begin exploration work later this year at several licence areas in Argentina. e exploration campaign will cover sites in the Vaca Muerta shale formation, where it acquired two blocks last year, and in the southern Austral Basin, it noted.
“We have exploration activity going on in Argentina, both in the south of the country and in the Vaca Muerta [basin],” said Matt Fox, the company’s executive vice-president.
Speaking during a conference call, Fox reported that ConocoPhilips had already allo- cated funding for the campaign under its 2020 exploration budget. That budget earmarks $150mn for activities in Argentina, Norway and Malaysia, he noted. But he also cautioned that the exploration programme could be trimmed if results were not in line with expectations.
The US-based company acquired shares respectively in two Vaca Muerta blocks last July, following an agreement with Germany’s Win- tershall Dea. It took a 45% stake in Aguada Fed- eral and a 50% stake in Bandurria Norte.
ConocoPhillips’ exploration campaign will provide a much-needed boost to Vaca Muerta. E orts to push ahead with work at unconven- tional hydrocarbon elds in the basin have been held up for years, largely owing to investors’ concerns over Argentina’s unsteady economy. Progress was also stymied in the wake of the government’s expropriation of YPF, the national oil company (NOC), from the Spanish oil major Repsol in 2012. Repsol had acquired YPF in 1999, but Buenos Aires renationalised a 51% stake 13 years later.
Vaca Muerta lies mostly within Neuquén Province in the central part of Argentina’s remote Patagonia region. It contains around 308tn cubic feet (about 8tn cubic metres) of shale gas and 16.2bn barrels of shale oil, according to the US Energy Information Administration
(EIA).
In 2017, Buenos Aires signed a set of agree-
ments with a group of companies on invest- ment in the Vaca Muerta elds. e signatories included state-run YPF, as well as foreign majors Chevron (US), Total (France), Royal Dutch Shell (UK/Netherlands) and Pan American Energy, a unit of BP (UK), to invest in the project. e companies agreed to invest a total of $5bn in the formation in 2017 and pledged to raise outlays to $15bn per year beginning in 2018.
e South American country’s current gov- ernment is hoping that Vaca Muerta projects will foster growth and prosperity by attracting foreign partners to the country. Argentina’s President Alberto Fernández, who took o ce only last December, has pledged to promote investment in the shale formation.
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Bandurria Norte eld in Vaca Muerta formation (Photo: Wintershall.)
Week 07 20•February•2020 w w w. N E W S B A S E . c o m P11
