Page 7 - LatAmOil Week 47 2019

LatAmOil VENEZUELA LatAmOil
Maduro: Caracas will back petro with 30mn barrels of oil from inventories
VENEZUELAN President Nicolas Maduro said last week that his government was using 30mn barrels of crude oil from its inventories to back the petro, its new crypto-currency unit.
In an address broadcast by the state televi- sion channel, Maduro stressed that these stocks would serve as concrete, physical support for the petro. “I will deliver these 30mn of barrels as a liquid, physical, material backing for the petro,” he said. “The inventories of crude and products in storage tanks are available for immediate commercialisation ... to sustain and back the operations of the sovereign Venezuelan cryp- to-asset, the petro.”
Caracas launched the petro early last year. At the time, it said it would use 5bn of oil from untapped fields to back the crypto-currency.
Maduro did not say why his government had adopted a new plan to support the petro. The switch appears to be a logical move, since the original collateral barrels lie within fields that do not have any production infrastructure and Caracas never explained how petro users might access them. Even so, Reuters noted last week that the president had not offered any details on how the inventories might be sold to back the petro.
The Venezuelan crypto-currency is not widely used or traded on any major exchanges. Nevertheless, officials in Caracas ordered the largest bank in the country, Banco de Venezuela, to start accepting the petro in July of this year.
PERU
PetroTal says its second horizontal well in Peru is on schedule, within budget
They also claimed recently that dozens of retail outlets were now accepting the petro as a form of payment.
The government has also used the petro for a number of social welfare payments, including but not limited to monthly bonuses for pen- sioners in late 2018. On November 17, Maduro announced that retirees and pensioners would be receiving their Christmas bonuses in petros this year.
The 30mn barrels of oil mentioned by Maduro last week account for most of Vene- zuela’s current inventories. According to Kpler, a data intelligence consultancy, the country’s stocks amounted to 39mn barrels of crude as of the end of October. ™
Venezuela originally planned to back the petro with untapped oil (Photo: AVN)
CANADA’S PetroTal has reported that the drill- ing of its second horizontal well at Bretaña, a field in Peru, is proceeding as anticipated.
In a statement dated November 25, the company said that work on the well, known as 5H, was going forward on schedule and within budget limits. It noted that drillers had already reached the target – namely the Vivian forma- tion, which lies with the field’s primary produc- tive oil reservoirs – at a vertical depth of 2,696 metres below the surface.
So far, it added, some “700 metres of the planned 870-metre horizontal section have been drilled.”
Assuming that the project continues to pro- gress at the expected rate, PetroTal will be able to complete the well and tie-ins and then start production testing by December 15.
The company further stated that it hoped to finish the task of commissioning a central production facility, known as CPF-1, at Bretaña during the week beginning December 22.
The commissioning process will boost the CPF-1 facility’s nominal production capacity to 10,000 barrels per day of crude oil and 40,000 bpd of water, it said.
CPF-1 should be able to operate above design capacity, PetroTal noted.
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