Cantarell Field - History

History

The first field was discovered in 1976 by Rudesindo Cantarell, Sr., a fisherman who complained that the oil seepage was ruining his fishing nets. PEMEX, the national oil company of Mexico, finally investigated it and found the oil deposit.

The Cantarell Field's porosity - or holes in the rock where the oil is located - is believed to be the result of a rubble pile from an asteroid strike that took place some 65 million years ago. This asteroid, which led to the formation of what has become known as the Chicxulub Crater on the Yucatán Peninsula, is thought to have been 6 miles (9.7 km) in diameter. Many scientists attribute this particular asteroid strike as being the “extinction event” that took out the dinosaurs. The impact energy from the strike is believed to have been some 2 million times that of the largest man-made explosion, that of the Tsar Bomba, a 50 megaton hydrogen device set off by Russia in 1961.

By 1981 the Cantarell complex was producing 1.16 million barrels per day (180,000 m3/d). However, the production rate dropped to 1 million barrels per day (160,000 m3/d) in 1995. The nitrogen injection project started operating in 2000, and it increased the production rate to 1.6 million barrels per day (250,000 m3/d), to 1.9 million barrels per day (300,000 m3/d) in 2002 and to 2.1 million barrels per day (330,000 m3/d) of output in 2003, which ranked Cantarell the second fastest producing oil field in the world behind Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia. However, Cantarell had much smaller oil reserves than Ghawar, so production began to decline rapidly in the second half of the decade.