Mexico is one of the few oil countries that plans to boost spending on oil exploration and production this year despite the decline the price of oil. That boost in E&P is providing opportunities for oil services firms during a year when other major oil companies are cutting spending.
Schlumberger's three-year contract will start in April. The Houston-based oil services giant has been drilling at Chicontepec since mid-2007, giving the company experience in a geologically difficult oil zone that has small pockets of oil with low reservoir pressure.
Chicontepec, an area slightly larger than Delaware that spans three Mexican states, is a main pillar in Pemex's strategy to get oil production back above 3 million barrels a day by 2015.
Pemex expects to be producing only 72,000 barrels a day at the basin this year despite two years of aggressive drilling. But by 2015, Pemex says, it will be producing 511,000 barrels a day, or a sixth of total output.
Some observers expect that target will be hard to meet. A well at Chicontepec only pumps a few hundred barrels a day, compared with a few thousand barrels at Mexico's prolific oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.
Author: Ksenia Kochneva
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Schlumberger Won Drilling Contract in Mexico
Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, has awarded Schlumberger a $687 million drilling contract for the Chicontepec project in northern Mexico