Fossil Energy – Gulf of Mexico
Mexico’s state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos will see its crude output reduced by some 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) until the beginning of August after a massive fire on Friday at an offshore platform, a top company source said.
The reduced production implies that in total Pemex will lose at least 2 million barrels of crude through the end of July, according to Reuters estimates. The source agreed on the calculation.
Fire broke out at dawn Friday on the platform Nohoch-A, later spreading to a compression facility at the iconic Cantarell field, which used to be Pemex’s largest producing field. The accident left at least two people dead.
Pemex, which produces in total about 1.6 million bpd of oil, said on Saturday it had an output loss of 700,000 barrels on the day of the accident at the Gulf of Mexico gas processing hub explaining “it shut down practically all the wells in the area.”
By Saturday, the company said it had already recovered some 600,000 barrels per day.
But the source said that fully recovering production will only be possible at the beginning of August.
“We are short of a little less than 100,000 barrels (per day). We expect that by the first days of August we will recover all the crude,” he said.
Pemex said on Friday the fire had been extinguished promptly, preventing its spread to four other processing centers, which are part of the so-called Sonda de Campeche, a series of marine fields about 85 kilometers from Ciudad del Carmen, in the southeastern state of Campeche.
