(Reuters, 26.Jun.2007) — Petro-Canada has pulled out of Venezuela by rejecting new nationalistic terms for oil projects and passing its stake in one discovery to President Hugo Chavez’s government, it said on Tuesday.
“We have decided not to migrate to the new commercial structure, so our working interest passes to the Venezuelan government,” Petro-Canada spokeswoman Michelle Harries said.
The company, one of Canada’s largest oil producers and refiners, has been a small player in Venezuela, having assumed some stakes in its 2002 takeover of Germany’s Veba Oil & Gas.
It had a 20 percent interest in the La Ceiba discovery, which was not producing oil.
Harries did not disclose the terms of the company’s exit.
Earlier on Tuesday, Rafael Ramirez, Venezuela’s energy and petroleum minister, said at a ceremony that some form of compensation for Petro-Canada was agreed upon.
La Ceiba was operated by Exxon Mobil Corp., which along with ConocoPhillips pulled out of Venezuela on Tuesday after failing to strike a deal to stay in a number of multibillion-dollar projects in the OPEC nation.
Earlier this month, Petro-Canada Chief Executive Ron Brenneman told the Reuters Energy Summit in New York he was pessimistic that La Ceiba would be developed into a big producing project, blaming the country’s regulatory turmoil.
The company had little money tied up in it, Brenneman said at the time. “To be honest we are not spending a lot of time on (La Ceiba),” he said.
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