30Mb/d Production Capacity Added to Tupilco

PEMEX CEO Octavio Romero announced this week that PEMEX had added two wells, each with a 15Mb/d capacity, to the onshore Tupilco field in Tabasco. Tupilco, which boasts reserves of a light 40.18° API crude, falls under Assignment AE-0140-2M-Comalcalco. It spans a total area of 1,319.57km² and is located 20km southwest of the Dos Bocas Maritime Terminal (TMDB) in Tabasco. The field entered the year with 22.55MMboe of 3P reserves and three further wells are expected to come online by the end of 2022 to improve the extraction rate.

In a video recorded in front of the Tupilco-3006 well and uploaded to Twitter, Romero explained the efficacy of PEMEX’s new strategy to optimize well drilling times and incorporate reserves more efficiently in line with its production target of 1.84MMb/d NOC is chasing by the end of the year, having surpassed the 1.7MMb/d mark by itself last month for the first time since April 2020, when the impact of the pandemic started to be felt. “These two new highly-productive wells will provide an additional capacity of 30Mb/d to this field. We held a meeting here to discuss the drilling time optimization strategy to be applied for both Tupilco and Quesqui before the end of the year,” Romero detailed, Accompanying Romero was Victor Vallejo, Deputy Director of Strategic Exploitation Projects, PEMEX, who noted that the Tupilco 3200 and Tupilco 3006 wells were completed well ahead of schedule and that average well completion time had been brought down from 140 to 100 days, with the goal of bringing this figure down to below 100 days before the end of 2022. 

As Romero mentioned, Quesqui, a priority field for PEMEX and crucial to the NOC reaching its upstream targets, is set to see the launch of an additional 12 wells before the end of the year. This news comes after PEMEX’s US$3.2 billion development plan for Quesqui, home to some 766.34MMboe of 3P reserves at the start of the calendar year and crucial to replacing the declining output of mature fields such as KMZ, was rejected by CNH in June. The regulatory body cited PEMEX's lack of technical information, concerns over investment figures as well as inconsistencies in production and reserve data documents as reasons for rejecting the NOC’s proposal. According to CNH, despite allotting US$979 million in its appraisal plan for Quesqui, PEMEX had only spent US$437 million on developing the natural gas field at the start of this year. Moreover, CNH pointed out that the Quesqui 2 and Quesqui 3 appraisal wells’ production greatly exceeded PEMEX’s forecast, while the results so far from the Quesqui 10 development well were disappointing.  

Analysts have suggested that such clashes between the industry regulatory and PEMEX’s upstream development plans led to a deterioration in the relationship between CNH’s former President, Rogelio Hernández Cázares, and the federal administration, with Hernández resigning in frustration at the start of this month. It is believed CNH’s rigorous permitting processes have been blamed for delays caused at fields categorized as a priority by PEMEX. The hydrocarbons sector needs to rapidly ramp up production to meet ambitious 2024 targets required to achieve energy sovereignty amid the president’s push to re-center PEMEX as the pillar for national development.