Xikin was placed at the beginning of the administration as one of the assets that would most contribute to raising Pemex ‘s oil production. The state company listed him within its priority fields and, from the speech, as one of the three assets with the greatest potential, along with Ixachi and Esah.
However, none of these fields has met the projected production. Xikin reports just 1.3% of promised crude, according to the most recent data from the National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH), the oil market regulator.
The plan presented by Pemex and approved by the regulator stated that the field located on the Tabasco coast – very close to where the Dos Bocas refinery is located – would reach its maximum production peak with just over 77,000 barrels of crude oil per day in September last year.
But the latest CNH records indicate that Pemex barely obtained 1,046 barrels of oil per day from Xikin until last May, far from the goal set.
Pemex reported the first production of the field during November 2019 and has not been able to establish a continuous or upward streak on the volume extracted. The highest figure reported by the state company in Xikin is 2,434 barrels per day during January of this year.
The state-owned company has been criticized for setting goals above what it could actually obtain in most of the fields in which it has activities, especially in those that it has designated as priorities, and the data indicates that Xikin is one of these cases.
“In the fields, a plan is regularly presented with very high production expectations, and when they come to execution, those numbers are not given,” says Andrés Armijos, director for Latin America of the Welligence consulting firm.
The consultant calculates that Xikin could produce between 5,000 and 6,000 barrels per day as a maximum peak in the next two years, far from the projections contemplated by Pemex.
Xikin is a field of special difficulty. Armijos explains that it is a high temperature and pressure asset, a segment in which the state company has little experience. In 2019, the national oil company awarded the oil production work in Xikin to the Mexican company Marinsa , a company with little experience in the activity, through a turnkey contract for 250 million dollars that also included the operation of the Esah field.
The regulator’s data shows that the state company has not completed its commitments in the field. By September 2021, the plan contemplated the operation of eight wells in Xikin, but CNH records indicate that there are only two wells in the asset, adding to Pemex’s production.
The administration of the state company has maintained the discourse that the fields it has designated as priorities have contributed to the recovery of Pemex’s production, but none of these 22 assets has met the goals set by the oil company.
