Exclusive - Mexico's Pemex to lose some 100,000 bpd of crude this month after fire - source
By Ana Isabel Martinez
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) — 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.
Pemex did not immediately reply to a request for comment.
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.
That means output from Pemex's offshore fields, from which the company extracts most of its oil, will be impacted in the meantime. He did not provide details on the company's schedule to progressively restart output.
«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.
MOUNTING CLAIMS
Cantarell, which produced more than 2 million bpd of oil two decades ago, currently produces about 170,000 bpd. Along with Ku-Maloob-Zaap, which contributes some 620,000 bpd
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