Brent price escalation presses on Vaca Muerta oil production

However, other companies in the sector, the non-integrated ones that extract but do not refine, expressed their complaints about the lag of producing oil with frozen sales prices, dollarized inputs and a current rate above $ 60. Many of these companies today deliver their products to the refiners with a pesk barrel between $ 40 and $ 42.

This situation not only provides for a deepening the loss of equipment, suspensions and possible layoffs in Vaca Muerta. It also puts the investment plans for 2020 at risk, which begin to close this month. In the sector they estimate that the 20 or 25 new teams that were going to start drilling next year will no longer do so. They assure that the investments doubt to maintain the interest here: in Permian one pays 30 dollars more by barrel.

The attack of the Houti militiamen to the plant of the Saudi state-owned Aramco caused a worldwide oil escalation. Aramco produces 5% of the world's hydrocarbon production. The crude oil that rose the most (almost 18%) was Brent, which is extracted mainly in the North Sea, and which has been taken as a reference in Argentina for several years.

In the greatest moments of uncertainty the value of the barrel reached u $ s71, but then cut the rise and now notes a growth of 10% Today, it is marketed to $ 66.69 for delivery in November at the International Exchange Futures (ICE), compared to the end of last Friday, when it closed in $ 60.23.

If you consider the freezing of Macri valid until mid-November, In the country, crude oil has a delay of up to 13% in dollars compared to the international price.

It will take two weeks to control the gas leak in Vaca Muerta

The state-owned company YPF works on a plan designed by a team of North American experts to contain the gas leak in the exploratory well of Loma La Lata Oeste, at the Vaca Muerta site in the province of Neuquén.

The fire started on Saturday morning and the flames could be seen from several kilometers away. As the flag oil company officially reported, the tasks to regain full control of the well could take between two and three weeks.

Guild of tankers denounced 1,000 suspensions for oil freezing

As they warned from the oil tankers' union, the freezing of the barrel in US $ 59 caused a lack of prices, an interruption of commercialization, the payment chain, the shortage of supplies, the pause in the drilling and the suspension of personnel.

About 30,000 tankers work in Vaca Muerta. Industry sources estimated that more than 30 drilling towers operated in the 11 areas of the field. A tower operates with about 20 workers, but for each team in operation there are about 80 active people. Guild leader Guillermo Pereyra revealed that some 1,000 Vaca Muerta workers were suspended by Decree 566.

The ones that raised the teams are the perforated San Antonio, an Argentine firm of US capitals, Schlumberger and Baker Hughes and the Canadian Calfrac. "There was not a fracture set left," Pereyra said. The union now seeks to sign an act with employers to guarantee the payment of salaries and avoid layoffs.