2 November 2011, Sweetcrude, Johannesburg – South Africa’s national oil company PetroSA said its joint venture with Venezuela’s PDVSA has found about 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the crude-bearing Orinoco Belt, a senior PetroSA official said on Wednesday.
PetroSA signed oil exploration and heavy crude oil production agreements in 2008 with its Venezuelan counterpart, which also paved the way for the two oil companies to certify reserves in Boyaca 4 block and covering some 700 square kilometers in the Orinoco oil belt, Reuters reported.
“We’ve been invited by PDVSA to participate in the quantification of the heavy oil Orinoco region and PetroSA is working with PDVSA in certifying the resources in place in Block 4 in Boyaca,” Everton September, PetroSA’s vice president for new upstream ventures told an African oil and gas conference, according to the news wire.
“That has yielded the result of oil in place with the most likely recoverable (rate) of about 1 billion barrels,” he said.
September said PetroSA, which was also exploring in Equatorial Guinea, would have to decide together with PDVSA on how this asset could be developed.
“PetroSA now has to make a decision whether it goes ahead to develop this and what equity it will take,” he said.
The agreement two years ago also gave PetroSA access to six mature fields in the south American country, which September said on Tuesday had up to 80 million barrels of oil equivalent, as PetroSA sought to secure crude for a proposed $10 billion refinery in South Africa.
