March 31st, 2010 - China Petroleum & Chemical Corp., Asia’s largest refiner known as Sinopec, is about to sign an agreement with Ecuador to invest almost $500 million to develop an oil block, said the South American country’s Non-Renewable Resources Minister Germanico Pinto.
Pinto, who is also the president of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, declined to offer a timeframe for the investment in an interview today during an energy conference in Cancun, Mexico.
Ecuador said in November 2009 that Hong Kong-based Sinopec was interested in developing a block known as Oglan in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The amount of the company’s investment wasn’t announced at the time.
Ecuador is trying to boost oil revenue amid a $4.2 billion budget deficit this year. The country defaulted on $3.2 billion of international bonds in the past year and a half and is the smallest member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, pumping 470,000 barrels of oil a day, according to Bloomberg estimates. “We’re going to keep output stable” around the 470,000 barrels of crude a day, Pinto said.
OPEC kept its production ceiling unchanged at 24.845 million barrels a day at a meeting March 17 in Vienna. It also didn’t change individual allocations. OPEC set the quotas at the end of 2008, amid the onset of the global economic recession. The group’s next scheduled meeting is Oct. 14.
Spain’s Repsol YPF SA, Brazilian state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA and China’s Andes Petroleum Co. are the largest foreign oil companies operating in Ecuador. - Bloomberg
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