Houston — U.S. oilfield service company SLB can rapidly increase its activities in Venezuela, provided the appropriate licensing, safety parameters and compliance measures are in place, it said on Friday.SLB was among the oil companies that met with the White House to discuss potential investment in Venezuela after the U.S. ousted President Nicolas Maduro in early January.
“We are already receiving a lot of inquiries from our customers,” CEO Olivier Le Peuch said during a post-earnings conference call.
“I would have to preface this with the right conditions, including licensing, including payments and operating licence will have to be put in place,” Le Peuch said.
HALLIBURTON ALSO LOOKING TO RE-ENTER VENEZUELA
Similarly, rival oilfield service provider Halliburton, which also met with the White House, said this week it would seek to re-enter Venezuela as soon as commercial and legal terms, including payment certainty, were resolved.
Halliburton said it was working through the mechanics of licences that it said were certain to fall in place.
Houston-based SLB said it was the only international service company actively operating in Venezuela, delivering services for an integrated oil company that it did not name under the oil major’s licence. Chevron is the only U.S. oil major producing crude in Venezuela, with some 240,000 barrels per day in joint ventures with Venezuelan state oil company PDVSA.
SLB reported a bigger-than-expected fourth-quarter profit and said it had maintained active facilities, equipment, and local personnel on the ground in Venezuela.
The company said it had more than $1 billion in peak annual revenue from Venezuela about a decade ago, and more than 3,000 people employed in the country. It currently has about 80 Venezuelans working in the country, and more than 1,000 Venezuelans are employed by SLB overall.
Halliburton has been seeking resumes for a range of positions in Venezuela, including engineers and technicians, according to a job board posting from the oilfield service company last week.
Stifel analyst Stephen Gengaro has said SLB and Halliburton are among the best-positioned companies to benefit from any new investment that flows into Venezuela.
President Donald Trump said on Thursday that U.S. oil companies will soon start drilling for oil in Venezuela, even as companies expressed concern about the viability of quickly returning to the country.
A proposed reform of Venezuela’s hydrocarbons law would allow foreign and local companies to operate oilfields on their own through a new contract model, commercialize output and receive sale proceeds even if acting as minority partners of state company PDVSA, drafts seen by Reuters on Thursday showed.
Reporting by Arathy Somasekhar in Houston and Tanay Dhumal in Bengaluru; editing by Barbara Lewis, Nathan Crooks, Rod Nickel – Reuters
