State-owned oil company Pemex CEO, Octavio Romero Oropeza, said 85% of affected oil production capacity has been recovered after a fire occurred at Mexico’s largest offshore oil production area in Campeche Bay on Friday.
Pemex said the fire reduced output by 700,000 bbl of oil. However, the loss has been reduced to 100,000 bbl, Romero said in social media video post on Saturday.
“In the coming days, we will continue to provide updates until we return to normalcy,” said Romero. Pemex in May produced 1.6 million b/d of crude oil, according to the company’s recent data.
The fire affected the Nohoch Alfa platform gas processing center in the aging Cantarell oil field, previously Mexico’s largest. However, this infrastructure is also used to bring onshore output from Mexico’s current largest field, Ku-Maloob-Zaap.
Pemex’s head of exploration and production Angel Cid previously said the explosion “substantially impacted” production at the platform, which moves about 600 MMcf/d of natural gas.
Pemex managed to control the fire in time to prevent it from spreading to the other platforms, said the company in a late Friday statement, adding that only one out of the five platforms in the area was affected by the fire.
Pemex said on Friday that two people died and one was missing after the explosion.
Mexico’s Cotemar, an oil field service company, confirmed in a separate statement on Saturday that the two workers who died in the blast were its employees and that another one is still missing.
A Pemex representative didn’t immediately respond to requests for comments on Monday about the production status.
This content was created by Oil Price Information Service, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. OPIS is run independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
–Reporting by Karla Omana, [email protected]; Editing by Daniel Rodriguez, [email protected]
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