PEMEX Says Cantarell Decline Faster Than Thought; May Hit 700K/D By 2012 - LA Times

MEXICO CITY — Production at Mexico's largest oil field is slipping faster than projected and officials see few options for quickly replacing the main source of the nation's oil riches. The struggles of the world's No. 5 oil producer have implications for an already tight global petroleum market and for the United States, the chief buyer of Mexico's heavy crude. It's also a threat to Mexico's social stability.

Production at Cantarell, the world's second-largest oil complex, which provides about 60% of Mexico's crude, averaged 1.78 million barrels a day in 2006. That's a 13% drop from 2005, said Jesus Reyes Heroles, director of Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, in a news conference Wednesday.

The decline was more than twice as great as the company's published predictions, and the slide will almost surely continue in 2007. Reyes said he expected average daily production at Cantarell to fall to 1.5 million barrels a day this year, a 15% decline. He estimated that within five years the aging field would pump about 700,000 barrels daily, less than half of December's production of 1.439 million barrels a day.

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But some analysts suspect that the situation at Cantarell is worse than Pemex executives are willing to publicly admit. "They are feeling pressure from the market to say that things are fine … and that they are doing well in production," said Mexico City energy analyst David Shields, the author of two books on Pemex. "But oil engineers will tell you that when a major field is in decline, it doesn't come back up again unless you do something very radical to change the dynamics…. I don't see that happening."


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http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-pemex8feb08,1,3031907.story?coll=la-headlines-business

because the current PTB seem to be content to let anybody who's out of work rot in the streets. We can all see how well that works in Iraq.

We need to get some money to put people to work fixing some of the problems we have created. The payback is there but the investment is not being made except by scattered individuals.

There's lots of discussion of this at The Oil Drum.

This whole "worse than we thought" refrain is starting to sound kind of, I dunno, familiar?

Like glaciers flowing to the sea. Faster, steeper, deeper, worse.

Is they can't find out why she died.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6348635.stm

Sorry, were you saying something?

This is a prime example of peakoil and its not only happening in Mexico but around the world.. I wonder when they will put all the pieces together and tell the American public about peakoil??

I think the non-telling is due to two reasons: genuine ignorance of the magnitude of the problem by (some of) the powers-that-be, and a mad scramble to keep the economic wealth flowing upwards as long as possible before catastrophe hits. It just wouldn't do to panic the markets. Roscoe Bartlett and Matt Simmons are increasingly nibbling away at the ignorance factor, but it doesn't help when flat-earth members such as Daniel Yergin and CERA offer up bizarre denials of the problem.