Guatemala to Publish
Bidding Rules for Oil Blocks
By Jens Erik Gould and Andres R. Martinez
(Bloomberg) -- Guatemala will publish
bidding rules for new oil and natural-gas
blocks before the end of next week as it
aims to more than triple output in a year,
President Alvaro Colom said.
The winners will be announced 60 days after
the rules are published, Colom said.
Guatemala expects oil production to reach as
much as 60,000 barrels a day by 2011, up
from about 16,000 barrels now, he said.
“The energy minister is very optimistic that
this year we will raise our extraction of
oil quite a bit,” Colom, 58, said in a
telephone interview yesterday.
Guatemala scrapped a plan last year to build
its first refinery, which would have allowed
the country to stop importing about 85,000
barrels of fuel a day. The Central American
nation is a member of Venezuelan President
Hugo Chavez’s Petrocaribe alliance,
receiving as much 20,000 barrels of oil and
oil products a day with financing from the
South American nation.
Colom said it’s “not the moment” to build a
refinery and that the nation will wait until
production reaches about 80,000 barrels a
day before considering the project.
Guatemala canceled the refinery project,
which had a capacity to process about
300,000 barrels a day, after Mexico backed
out of supplying the oil last year.
The blocks that Guatemala will auction may
boost output to about 85,000 barrels of oil
a day, he said, without specifying when.
Last year, Guatemala delayed the auction of
16 blocks, which the government estimated
would draw as much as $235 million of
exploration investments, mostly to search
for natural gas off the country’s Pacific
coast.
Companies working in Guatemala include
Perenco SA, a closely held French oil
company, and Toronto-based Quetzal Energy
Ltd.
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