Boca de Jaruco is one of the most high-tech projects of Zarubezhneft. It has been implemented jointly with the Cuban company Cupet since 2011, and since then it has achieved great success in development and production.
As of 1 September, 2019, over 6,000 tonnes of heavy super-viscous oil has been produced. Cuba is mostly known for heavy oil reserves.
In October 2019, the then Prime Minister of Russia, Dmitri Medvedev, inaugurated drilling on the horizontal extraction well.
Zarubezhneft launched in August 2020 the first horizontal well in the flowing mode with an initial oil flow rate of 52 tons/day at the Boca de Jaruco field in the Republic of Cuba. The uniqueness of the project is associated with the complexity of the production of extra-viscous oil on this project.
Thanks to the oil upgrading technology developed jointly with the Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University (KFU) - catalytic aquathermolysis - Zarubezhneft managed to reduce the ratio of injected steam to oil produced by almost half - less than 3 th/t. This compares with a number of other similar projects being implemented in other countries.
The project according to previous Zarubezhneft statements is expected to cost in its first phase €100 million ($133 million) and result cumulatively in a production volume over 10 years of up to 2 million tons of oil. The total deposit is estimated 3.7 billion tonnes.
