By Daniel Cancel
May 13 (Bloomberg) -- Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said that a natural-gas platform sank off the eastern coast of the country because of a faulty flotation system. The incident comes three weeks after a fatal rig accident in the Gulf of Mexico.
“The gas platform Aban Pearl sank a few minutes ago,” Chavez said early today in a message on his Twitter account. “The good news is that its 95 workers are safe. They were evacuated and in this moment two patrol ships from the Navy are headed to the area.”
Chavez is trying to tap offshore gas reserves to power thermoelectric plants amid an energy crisis. Repsol YPF SA, Eni SpA and Chevron Corp. are also exploring offshore fields. More than 5,000 barrels of oil a day have been leaking from a damaged well in the Gulf of Mexico 40 miles (64 kilometers) off the Louisiana coast and about 300 miles off Mexico’s Yucatan coast. The Deepwater Horizon oil rig, leased by BP Plc, exploded on April 20 and sank two days later, killing 11 workers.
Petroleos de Venezuela, the state-owned oil company, said a failure in the floatation system of the Aban Pearl caused the rig to sink after a “massive” inflow of water. Technicians sealed the gas well with a security valve before the platform sank, the company said today in an e-mail.
Venezuela, which has Latin America’s largest natural-gas reserves at 170 trillion cubic feet of gas, is certifying reserves and expects to reach 400 trillion cubic feet which would give it the fourth-largest reserves in the world, behind Russia, Iran and Qatar, according to BP data.
Leak Avoided
Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s oil minister and president of the company known as PDVSA, said that the platform, which began to tilt late yesterday, sank at 2:20 a.m. local time. Ramirez, speaking on state television, said workers closed the valve connected to the well to avoid a gas leak.
PDVSA forecast production would reach 600 million cubic feet a day in the offshore area near Trinidad and Tobago where it is drilling for gas.
The PDVSA platform was leased from an Indian company called Aban Offshore Ltd., Ramirez said. An investigation will be conducted to determine the cause of the accident, he said.
Telephone calls seeking comment from Aban’s headquarters in Chennai, India, weren’t answered.
“Fortunately the well poses no environmental risks,” Ramirez said in an e-mailed statement from the Information Ministry. “We’ve contacted the owner of the platform and the experts are studying the cause of the unfortunate incident.”
U.S. Investigation
A Gulf oil well failed a pressure test hours before a drilling rig exploded last month, an executive for BP yesterday told the U.S. House Energy Committee that’s investigating the incident. The committee is investigating the explosion that triggered a spill that threatens the Gulf Coast from Louisiana to Florida with more than 3 million gallons of oil.
Chavez said on April 27 that the drilling in the Dragon gas fields, where the rig was located, is “historic” for PDVSA as it was the first offshore project developed by the company without foreign partners. “This is historic, because everything was done by PDVSA on its own,” he said. “We already have pipelines, remote- controlled robots and underwater technology that our PDVSA is doing on its own.”
‘Big Setback’
The accident will delay PDVSA’s plans to boost gas production, Diego Gonzalez, former head of the oil company’s natural-gas division, said today in a telephone interview from Caracas.
“This is a big setback for the company’s plans since the equipment is lost and they’ll have to hire another platform,” Gonzalez said.
Venezuela imports natural gas from Colombia to cover a deficit and to supply power and petrochemical plants in Western Venezuela. Chevron ships between 50 million and 200 million cubic feet of gas per day to Venezuela from Colombia, Ali Moshiri, the company’s head of exploration and production for Africa and Latin America, told reporters yesterday in Caracas.
With assistance from Jim Efstathiou Jr. in New York, Joe Carroll in Chicago and David Wethe in Houston --Editors: Robin Saponar, Dale Crofts
To contact the reporter on this story: Daniel Cancel in Caracas at dcancel@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Dale Crofts at dcrofts@bloomberg.net.
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