Brazil’s state-owned Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) and Ecuador’s state oil firm Petroecuador signed a memorandum of understanding Apr. 5 to develop Ecuador’s Ishpingo-Tiputini-Tambococha oil fields in the Amazon region.
This area of fields already has five discoveries with a potential output of 190,000 b/d of oil that could double after 4 years of exploration.
The fields are in the remote easternmost Oriente Province in Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve (see map, OGJ, July 10, 1995, p. 32). They hold nearly 1 billion bbl of crude reserves, said Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa in Brazil during a visit to Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. With the MOU, Petrobras joins a consortium of Chile’s state-owned oil company Empresa Nacional del Petróleo (ENAP) and a unit of China’s state-owned Sinopec.
They signed the MOU committing to present an exploration program to Ecuador in the next few months with concrete proposals for protecting the region’s highly vulnerable ecosystem.
Ishpingo has 16° gravity oil in Cretaceous Hollin. Tiputini is a 1970 discovery that contains 18° gravity oil. Tambococha also dates to the early 1970s, as does Petrobras’s interest in operating in the area.
Lula said Brazil will invest $1 billion in oil and gas exploration and biofuels projects in Ecuador until 2010. The two countries also signed agreements to jointly produce biofuels and ethanol in Ecuador using Brazilian technology.
Brazil is the world’s number one sugar producer and exporter, and the leading exporter of ethanol made from sugarcane. It also is the world’s second-largest ethanol producer after the US and is ramping up production of soybean-based biodiesel.
Correa said Ecuador will return as a member of OPEC, although he didn’t say when. Ecuador was a member until the 1990s, when it failed to meet its export quotas.
