Peru is a Latin-American country with a long history of hydrocarbon exploration and production, producing oil and gas for over 100 years, attracting investor interest thanks to its promising geology, consistency of production, and the professionalism of its people.
The Ministry of Energy and Mines is in charge of issuing the legislation, regulations, and direction of the country’s mining and energy industries, in close cooperation with Perupetro, the world-renowned national hydrocarbon agency.
Peru has taken a lot of steps to become friendly to new and existing exploration and production investors, forgoing sign-on bonuses and making Perupetro’s extensive database available for free to all companies interested in investing in the country’s hydrocarbons sector, including all the available processed information for blocks. In order to access the data, a company simply has to send a request to Perupetro.
Currently, Perupetro is working to update all its data, having already reprocessed 15,000 km of 2D and 18,500 km of 3D seismic data in partnership with CGG, providing companies with the necessary information to make educated investment decisions.
The National Hydrocarbon Agency has partnered with PGS, GXT, CGG and Searcher to provide extensive multi-client coverage, that will help identify new plays and prospects and enhance exploration in areas with proven potential, even reviewing the existent geological data held by prior explorers. The multiclient data will allow for fuller exploration of tectonic and basin developments, existing and potential petroleum systems. Perupetro has plans to continue increasing its multi-client portfolio, focusing on frontier and semi-explored basins.
Furthermore, Peru’s national organizations are currently working on optimizing the period between signing a contract, first drilling and production, in order to enable faster ROIs for investors, and better production cycles. These changes will take place through a new Royalty Framework, and updates to the National Energy Plan, and the Organic Law of Hydrocarbons,
Geological Potential
Peru is resource-rich, with over 421 MMbbl of proven and probable reserves located in 4 basins onshore Mamanon, Ucayali, Talara, and partly offshore, leaving 14 basins with high exploration potential open to exploration by new operators looking to unlock opportunities. In addition to that, the North Jungle has an expected value of $44 billion USD in hydrocarbon reserves that can be activated within the next decade.
Currently, Perupetro is working on a study to establish the full economic value of the hydrocarbon resources in the basins of Talara, the North and South Jungles, in order to enable incoming investors to make the best decisions when developing exploration and monetization plans.
The majority of Peru’s production comes from 2 provinces, the Talara province, responsible for 57% of total production, and the Maranon province, responsible for 41%. Both basins have a wide variety of projects available for new investors, including mature fields that have good midstream connectivity and downstream operations, being monetizable from Day 1.
The Talara Basin: Peru’s oil industry’s core
The Talara Basin is a Paleocene-age forearc basin, located in the north coast of Peru. Talara Basin’s hydrocarbon-rich formations range in age from Pennsylvanian to Oligocene, and the reservoirs are mainly Upper Cretaceous through Oligocene sandstones of fluvial, deltaic, and nearshore to deep-marine environments. The primary reservoirs are Eocene-age sandstones and some turbidites of the Talara and Salinas Groups, possessing great potential for new discoveries.
There are forty-two oil & gas fields in the Talara Basin, with four fields producing oil and gas from fractured quartzites of the Pennsylvanian Amotape Formation.
For interested companies, Peru has available opportunities in 8 blocks located in the Talara basin: Block I, Block II, Block V, Blocks VI-VIII, Block X, Block XV
Block X: An exemplar mature opportunity
A good example of the mature opportunities available to investors is Block X, currently operated by CNPC PERU S.A, with oil production of 14.83 Mbopd and an accumulated volume of 499.9MMbbl, located in the Talara and Contraalmirante Villar provinces. The block currently has 3,262 active wells, with 3,196 producing and 66 injection wells.
Block X is part of the Talara Basin, which is characterized by an intense faulting with the normal type predominating and to a much lesser extent by a high and low angle inverse faulting.
Regarding exploratory opportunities in the block, the Paleogene, Cretaceous and Paleozoic Play Concepts has been visualized as an exploratory opportunity; identifying 9 Paleogene Leads: the LPl-X-1, LPl-X-2, LPl-X-3, LPl-X-4, LPl-X-5, LPl-X-6, LPl-X-7, LPl- X-8 and LPl-X-9; one Cretaceous Lead named: LK-X-1 and 4 Paleozoic Leads: the LPz-X-1, LPz-X-2, LPz-X-3, LPz-X-4. These leads were subject to a volumetric estimation using the properties of the rocks and
fluids in the reservoir to calculate the POES / GOES The block’s Carboniferous strata has a lot of exploration and production potential, while the middle-shallow region of the Paleogene strata is relatively mature.
The block is immediately monetized, as crude oil is directly provided to the Talara refinery, Peru’s second largest refinery, with a refining capacity of of 65 mbpd, depending highly on Block X’s production, ensuring an existing buyer for its production.
Regarding natural gas, all natural gas produced is transported directly to the Parinas Natural Gas Plant, before being moved to the Central Thermo-Electic centre Malacas to be used for power generation. Currently, the quantity of associated gas sales produced in Block X is 9 to 15 MMSCFD, with the capacity of the sales system is 27 MMSCFD.