Pemex reports major new find offshore Tabasco State

Mexico’s national oil company (NOC) Pemex has reported the discovery of a large new field off the coast of Tabasco State in the southern Gulf.

Octavio Romero, the CEO of Pemex, described the field as “gigantic” in an interview with Jenaro Villamil, the president of government-run broadcaster Sistema Público de Radiodifusión del Estado Mexicano (SPR). “It is a large field surrounded by smaller ones that could together hold prospective resources” of as much as 1bn barrels of crude, he said. He also compared it favourably to other major finds such as Ixachi, an onshore natural gas and condensate field that contains 1.9bn barrels of oil equivalent (boe), and Quesqui, another onshore gas and condensate field that comprises 900mn boe.

A discovery of this size has the potential to help the company shore up production rates, which have been in decline for more than a decade, the Bloomberg news agency commented. By contrast, S&P Global Platts expressed some scepticism about the long-term impact of the find. It quoted Gonzalo Monroy, the CEO of Mexico’s GMEC consultancy, as saying that high production costs for gas were not likely to help the NOC address its sagging output and high debt load, which amounts to more than $110bn.

Similarly, Marco Cota, CEO of the Mexican consultancy Talanza Energy, told Platts that the announcement might be mostly symbolic, as it was not yet clear whether the new field was commercially viable. “At the end of the day, Mexico has no shortage of reserves. It is the environment for investments in the country that is deteriorating,” he remarked.

Romero did not identify the new field by name, though other sources have said it is Dzimpona. Pemex intends to wait until March 18, the date of a national holiday celebrating the government’s expropriation of oil assets held by foreign companies in 1938, to make more details of the find public, he told Villamil.

However, the Pemex chief did comment on the Mexican government’s decision to keep the NOC’s fields in production throughout the whole of 2020, despite calls for slowing upstream development operations in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. He defended this move, saying it had allowed the company to continue operating at a steady pace.

“The decision not to stop was very important because we didn’t lose the momentum,” he declared.

Pemex has come under fire in some quarters for having continued to send work teams out to job sites last year, even as the pandemic slowed domestic and global energy demand and the company fell behind on payments to suppliers and oilfield service providers (OSPs). Its policy on this front appears to have contributed to higher infection rates among Pemex employees and contractors.