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The 'Chicontepec Basin' is a petroleum system in Mexico located north-east of Mexico City, covering an area of around 3,800 km² in the states of Veracruz, Puebla and Hidalgo. Several oil fields have been discovered in that area since 1926. A major field was discovered in 1973 but contains extra heavy crude which due to special refining needs is considered unviable at this time. Since that time, tiny amounts of oil have been produced^[1]. While the reserves are overwhelmingly very heavy crude, pockets of lighter oil, as well as natural gas, are also found in the basin^[2].

Contents

Overview

Notes and references

Overview

Chicontepec Basin is believed to hold 33 billion barrels of oil in place, with 17.6 billion barrels recoverable. These are ''probable'', but not ''proved'' reserves. In 2003, PEMEX said it could take total investment of $30 billion over 15 years to fully develop Mexico's oil and gas reserves in the Chicontepec Basin. The project would require drilling 13,500 wells in the basin, much more than the total number of oil wells now producing in the country ^[3]. This is situation is interesting wells would be numerous and small. It would be necessary to get permission to drill from the communities that these wells would be in. Fortunes might be made by private firms in the pre-exploratory negotiating phase.
In March 2006, Mexican President Vicente Fox announced that Pemex would be investing $37.5 billion US dollars over the next 20 years on the oil fields of Chicontepec. It is hoped that this will boost the fields' output to 1 million barrels per day. Pemex's chief executive estimates that 20,000 wells are to be drilled in order to exploit this field. Article
In addition to being economically and technically challenging, the basin's development also faces political difficulty, because the areas overlapping it are quite densely populated^[4], including by native Americans like the otomi tribe. Despite these difficulty, Pemex urgently need production from Chicontepec to offset the rapid production decline in its main offshore field, Cantarell.

Notes and references

1. About 2500 b/d in 2002 according to [1]
2. World oil, Nov. 2001 Vol. 222 No 11
3. Sergio Solache, 17 February 2007, Arizona Republic, claims that "Pemex now has more than 5,000 wells in production"
4. [2]