Exploratory oil well off Cuba comes up dry
HAVANA (AP) — An exploratory oil well off the coast of Havana has failed and will be capped and abandoned, Spanish company Repsol said Friday, a disappointment for Cuba but far from a death-blow to the island’s petroleum dreams.
Repsol SA is evaluating the data it collected since the Scarabeo-9 drill rig arrived in January and will determine whether to sink further wells, spokesman Kristian Rix said.
It’s not uncommon to strike out with offshore wells as four of every five come up dry, he said, and it’s too soon to say whether other parts of Repsol’s exploration block are commercially viable.
“Mapping an (offshore) oil field is like trying to draw a map of a city when all you have is one in 10 lampposts working and a bit of a fog,” Rix said by phone from Madrid. “It’s very hard to do, so I can’t draw any conclusions from one well about the whole rest of it. These are questions that geologists will have to answer.”
Nor does the failed well mean that the rest of Cuba’s offshore exploratory area, which is estimated to hold as much as 5 billion to 9 billion barrels, is barren.
“I think it’s disappointing news, but in my opinion it doesn’t mean that the whole of the Cuban north belt is not a geological zone that in the future could produce a substantial amount of hydrocarbons,” said Jorge Pinon, former president of Amoco Oil Latin America and now an energy expert at the University of Texas.
“It’s disappointing, but it’s not surprising,” he added.
The project has generated controversy in the United States, with concerns of a possible environmental disaster like the 2010 Macondo-Deepwater Horizon blowout and spill on the other side of the Gulf.
Many feared it would be impossible for longtime foes in Washington and Havana to coordinate response and containment, threatening large stretches of coastline in Cuba, Florida and beyond.
Meanwhile Cuban-American politicians criticized the Obama administration for not stopping the drilling altogether. They said it pointed to a need to put even more teeth into the 50-year-old US economic embargo, which essentially bars American companies from doing oil business with Cuba and threatens sanctions against foreign companies if they don’t follow its restrictions.
The 50-year-old sanctions have greatly complicated the drilling project, making it far more complicated than usual to line up equipment and resources.