Mexico: Five workers were killed and six injured in Sunday’s fire on a foreign platform in the southern Gulf of Mexico managed by Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), which cut about a quarter of Mexico’s oil production, the company said Monday. .
The fire broke out when teams performed maintenance on the platform, and a search for missing workers continues, Pemex CEO Octavio Romero said at a news conference.
The platform remains out of order, with about 421,000 barrels of oil lost per day and 125 wells offline, he said. The production loss was slightly less than what was reported earlier Monday, citing a business document.
The group plans to recommence power supply to the facility and attached wells by Wednesday, with the goal of restoring gas and oil production thereafter. The impact of the crash on Pemex’s monthly production and exports has not yet been estimated, Romero told.
The densely indebted Pemex has lengthy had a poor safety record, and dozens of people have died in major accidents in the past. Yet the platform fire was one of the worst Pemex has suffered under the current government.
“There’s no problem with a lack of investment, there’s also a problem with a lack of resources,” Romero said. “The oil industry is a risky industry. We have had accidents that are less than in previous years.”
A fire on another Pemex platform in the Bay of Campeche caused by a leak under the gas pipeline has been called a ‘fire eye’ on social media due to the circular shape of the fire. It took longer than five hours to extinguish the fire.
A rapid decline in gas availability, used by Pemex to boost oil at the Ku-Maloob-Zaap fields, raised crude production in that group to nearly 275,000 bpd by early Monday from more than 719,000 bpd on Sunday dropped, a document Reuters saw showed. read more
Pemex’s whole crude product was 1.69 million bpd in the month of June.
Four of the people killed in Sunday’s fire were from a contractor firm, Mexican oil services firm Cotemar, and one from Pemex, Romero responded.
Pemex said two people at the site are still missing. They are from another contractor firm, formerly called Bufete de Monitoreo de Condiciones e Integridad.
Pemex told it would examine the origin of the fire at the E-Ku-A2 platform, part of the Ku-Maloob-Zaap complex’s gas processing factory in the Bay of Campeche. The fire was brought under control on Sunday afternoon.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who displayed grief over the incident at a morning conference, made the revival of Pemex’s fortunes a top priority of his government.
