Mexico awards first deep-water oil agreement
MEXICO CITY — Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex said Monday that it has awarded its first contract with a private firm for a joint operating agreement in deep-water oil drilling.
The deep-water field known as the Trion block will be developed by the Australian firm BHP Billiton under a “farm-out” agreement in which the leaseholder of an oil field grants an operating interest to another company to develop the field.
The Trion field is near Mexico’s maritime boundary with the United States in the Gulf of Mexico and is believed to hold the equivalent of 485 million barrels of oil.