Mexico’s NOC Pemex will offer 40 fields in farm-out auctions

Pemex plans large farm-out offer

MEXICO CITY, December 7, 2017 – Mexico’s NOC Pemex will offer 40 fields in farm-out auctions, company CEO Carlos Treviño said in an interview with local news publications on Wednesday.

Speaking to El Financiero, the executive said that the fields would likely be grouped together, forming between four and seven blocks in total. The majority of the fields are located onshore.

“Some of these fields are very small, where it didn’t make sense for someone to only go for one of them. That is why we are clustering them,” Treviño said.

Pemex is already engaging with the relevant government entities to iron out the details of the partnerships, such as setting up the fiscal framework for the clusters with the Secretariat of Finance and Public Credit.

The next farm-out tender is scheduled to take place alongside a bidding round for deepwater blocks on January 31. The Maximino-Nobilis block, located in the Perdido Fold Belt area of the Gulf of Mexico, contains several fields with 3P reserves estimated at 502 million boe. According to Treviño, nine companies have already registered to bid on the block.

The last farm-outs were granted on October 4. The onshore Ogarrio and Cárdenas-Mora blocks went to Germany’s DEA Deutsche Erdoel and Egypt’s Cheiron Holdings, respectively, while shallow-water Ayin-Batsil garnered no bids and was declared abandoned.

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