By OGJ editors
HOUSTON, Sept. 29 -- Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados Ecuador SA (OCP) will begin moving 180,000 b/d of heavy oil from Ecuador 's Oriente basin in October through its recently completed 450,000 b/d OCP pipeline, according to Business News Americas. The pipeline was completed in August.
Dow Jones reported OCP president Bernardo Tobar as saying OCP could increase volumes to 250,000 b/d by yearend 2004, depending on the shippers.
The OCP consortium consists of operator Techint International Construction Corp., Buenos Aires, 4.1% and five companies that produce oil in the Oriente basin.
Spain's Repsol-YPF SA 25.7%, Calgary-based Encana Corp. 31.4%, and Occidental Ecuador Inc. 12.3%, all OCP members, have made their first test shipments through the OCP pipeline, Encana filling two ships Saturday with a combined 1.08 million bbl, BNA said.
These test loads in September transported a total of about 3.6 million bbl in seven tankers.
The other consortium members, Italy's Agip SPA 7.5%, Perenco Ecuador Ltd., 4% and Argentina's Petrobras Energia SA 15%, have signed for reserve capacity on the pipeline but indicated they would not be ready to start shipping crude by October.
Meanwhile, newspaper El Universal reported that Ecuador's state oil company Petroecuador told OCP it would ship 74,000 b/d through the alternative SOTE pipeline, rather than the OCP line as originally planned. Private companies are charged about $2/bbl on OCP but the government would have been given a preferential rate of $1.50-1.75/bbl. The SOTE pipeline cost is 30¢/bbl, but it would not separate the heavy crude from the light, as OCP would.