Chicontepec Formation - Overview

Overview

Chicontepec Basin contains Mexico's largest certified hydrocarbon reserve, totaling more than 19 billion barrels (3.0×10^9 m3) of oil equivalent with original oil in place of over 139 billion barrels (22.1×10^9 m3) of oil equivalent; recovery is complicated by challenging, low recovery rate reservoirs, but is made more attractive due to the presence of light and super-light crude oil. . In 2003, PEMEX said it could take total investment of $30 billion over 15 years to fully develop Mexico's oil and gas reserves in the Chicontepec Basin. The project would require drilling 13,500 wells in the basin, much more than the total number of oil wells now producing in the country. This situation is interesting as the oil wells would be numerous and small. It would be necessary to get permission to drill from the communities that these wells would be in. Fortunes might be made by private firms in the pre-exploratory negotiating phase.

In addition to being economically and technically challenging, the basin's development also faces political difficulty, because the areas overlapping it are quite densely populated, including by Native Americans like the Otomi tribe. Despite these difficulties, Pemex urgently needs production from Chicontepec to offset the rapid production decline in its main offshore field, Cantarell.

In February 2009, the certified reserves of Chicontepec Field were comparable with half of those in Saudi Arabia with 139 billion barrels (22.1×10^9 m3), which puts Mexico at the fourth place of the countries with most oil reserves after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia and Canada, yet, Mexico lacks the technology to exploit those reserves.