Cantarell Field or Cantarell Complex is an aging supergiant
offshore oil field in
Mexico
Mexico, officially the United Mexican States, is a country in North America. It is the northernmost country in Latin America, and borders the United States to the north, and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast; while having maritime boundar ...
. It was discovered in 1976 after oil stains were noticed by a fisherman, Rudesindo Cantarell Jimenez, in 1972. It was placed on
nitrogen injection in 2000, and production peaked at in 2004. In terms of cumulative production to date, it was the largest oil field in Mexico, and one of the largest in the world. However, production has declined since 2004, falling to in 2022. In 2009 it was superseded by
Ku-Maloob-Zaap as Mexico's largest oil field.
Location
Cantarell is located offshore in the
Bay of Campeche
The Bay of Campeche (), or Campeche Sound, is a bight in the southern area of the Gulf of Mexico, forming the north side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It is surrounded on three sides by the Mexican states of Campeche, Tabasco and Veracruz. The ...
. This complex comprises four major fields: Akal (by far the largest), Nohoch, Chac and Kutz. The reservoirs are formed from carbonate
breccia
Breccia ( , ; ) is a rock composed of large angular broken fragments of minerals or Rock (geology), rocks cementation (geology), cemented together by a fine-grained matrix (geology), matrix.
The word has its origins in the Italian language ...
of
Late Cretaceous
The Late Cretaceous (100.5–66 Ma) is the more recent of two epochs into which the Cretaceous Period is divided in the geologic time scale. Rock strata from this epoch form the Upper Cretaceous Series. The Cretaceous is named after ''cre ...
age, the rubble from the asteroid impact that created the
Chicxulub Crater
The Chicxulub crater is an impact crater buried underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. Its center is offshore, but the crater is named after the onshore community of Chicxulub Pueblo (not the larger coastal town of Chicxulub Puerto). I ...
. The recently discovered Sihil field (1-15,000 million barrels) contains light oil in
Jurassic
The Jurassic ( ) is a Geological period, geologic period and System (stratigraphy), stratigraphic system that spanned from the end of the Triassic Period million years ago (Mya) to the beginning of the Cretaceous Period, approximately 143.1 Mya. ...
strata below the other reservoirs and is generally referred to as a separate field, although its development will obviously benefit from the infrastructure already in place above it. Cantarell's oil production peaked in 2004 and has declined in subsequent years, with further decline expected in the future.
Geology
The
Chicxulub impactor produced the Chicxulub crater and subsequent carbonate-debris breccia, which became the
oil reservoir
A petroleum reservoir or oil and gas reservoir is a subsurface accumulation of hydrocarbons contained in Porosity, porous or fractured rock formations. Such reservoirs form when kerogen (ancient plant matter) is created in surrounding rock by t ...
for the fields around
Villahermosa and the
Bay of Campeche
The Bay of Campeche (), or Campeche Sound, is a bight in the southern area of the Gulf of Mexico, forming the north side of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. It is surrounded on three sides by the Mexican states of Campeche, Tabasco and Veracruz. The ...
where the Cantarell Complex is located.
[Barton, R., Bird, K., Hernandez, J.G., Grajales-Nishimura, J.M., Murillo-Muneton, G., Herber, B., Weimer, P., Koeberl, C., Neumaier, M., Schenk, O., Stark, J., 2010, High Impact Reservoirs, Oilfield Review, Houston: Schlumberger, pp. 14-29]
The
porosity
Porosity or void fraction is a measure of the void (i.e. "empty") spaces in a material, and is a fraction of the volume of voids over the total volume, between 0 and 1, or as a percentage between 0% and 100%. Strictly speaking, some tests measure ...
is 8%-12% in the reservoir at a depth of about 1500 m, which grades from being coarse-grained to fine-grained, called Unit 1 and 2 respectively, and overlain by a seal of
shaly ejecta-rich layer called Unit 3.
Following impact, the carbonate platform collapsed, depositing the coarse breccias, which were then overlain mixed and overlain by finer breccias from the consequent
tsunamis
A tsunami ( ; from , ) is a series of waves in a water body caused by the displacement of a large volume of water, generally in an ocean or a large lake. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and underwater explosions (including detonations, la ...
.
Folding occurred in the
early Miocene
The Early Miocene (also known as Lower Miocene) is a sub-epoch of the Miocene epoch (geology), Epoch made up of two faunal stage, stages: the Aquitanian age, Aquitanian and Burdigalian stages.
The sub-epoch lasted from 23.03 ± 0.05 annum, Ma to ...
to
Pliocene
The Pliocene ( ; also Pleiocene) is the epoch (geology), epoch in the geologic time scale that extends from 5.33 to 2.58[Cretaceous
The Cretaceous ( ) is a geological period that lasted from about 143.1 to 66 mya (unit), million years ago (Mya). It is the third and final period of the Mesozoic Era (geology), Era, as well as the longest. At around 77.1 million years, it is the ...](_blank)
and
Upper Jurassic
The Late Jurassic is the third epoch of the Jurassic Period, and it spans the geologic time from 161.5 ± 1.0 to 143.1 ± 0.8 million years ago (Ma), which is preserved in Upper Jurassic strata.Owen 1987.
In European lithostratigraphy, the name ...
blocks forming the
Structural trap
In petroleum geology, a trap is a geological structure affecting the reservoir rock and caprock of a petroleum system allowing the accumulation of Hydrocarbon, hydrocarbons in a petroleum reservoir, reservoir. Traps can be of two types: stratigra ...
in which hydrocarbons migrated in the
Miocene
The Miocene ( ) is the first epoch (geology), geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about (Ma). The Miocene was named by Scottish geologist Charles Lyell; the name comes from the Greek words (', "less") and (', "new") and mea ...
.
There are four blocks in the Cantarell Complex, Akal, Nohoch, Chac and Kutz with the Akal block underlain by a fifth block, Sihil, where oil was discovered in 1998.
Production history
By 1981, the Cantarell complex was producing . However, the production rate dropped to in 1995. The
nitrogen injection project, including the largest nitrogen plant in the world, installed onshore at Atasta Campeche, started operating in 2000, and it increased the production rate to , to in 2002 and to of output in 2003, which ranked Cantarell the second fastest producing oil field in the world behind
Ghawar Field
Ghawar (Arabic: الغوار) is an oil field located in Al-Ahsa Governorate, Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia. Measuring (some ), it is by far the largest conventional oil field in the world, and accounts for roughly a third of the cumulative ...
in
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia, officially the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), is a country in West Asia. Located in the centre of the Middle East, it covers the bulk of the Arabian Peninsula and has a land area of about , making it the List of Asian countries ...
. However, Cantarell had much smaller oil reserves than Ghawar, so production began to decline rapidly in the second half of the decade. Unfortunately, the nitrogen has migrated into the gas, lowering its heating value and thus, economic value, and soon will require treatment to remove the nitrogen from the gas, to be able to use the gas as a fuel.
Luis Ramírez Corzo, head of PEMEX's exploration and production division, announced on August 12, 2004 that the actual oil output from Cantarell was forecast to
decline steeply from 2006 onwards, at a rate of 14% per year. In March 2006 it was reported that Cantarell had already peaked, with a second year of declining production in 2005. For 2006, the field's output declined by 13.1%, according to
Jesús Reyes Heróles, the director-general of PEMEX.
In July 2008, the daily production rate fell sharply by 36% to from a year earlier.
Analysts theorize that this rapid decline is a result of production enhancement techniques causing faster short-term oil extraction at the expense of field longevity. By January 2009, oil production at Cantarell had fallen to , a drop in production of 38% for the year, resulting in a drop in total Mexican oil production of 9.2%, the fifth year in a row of declining Mexican production.
In 2008, Pemex expected Cantarell's decline to continue to 2012 and eventually stabilizing at an output level of around .
[ By September 2009 this figure was already achieved, marking one of the most dramatic declines ever seen in the oil industry.] Production was now expected to stabilize at . However the production declined to by April 2012. The shortfall had a negative effect on Mexico's annual government budget and sovereign-credit rating. Production continued to decline and production was at 340,000 barrels per day in June 2014. Pemex planned to spend 6 billion US dollars until 2017 to stop the decline and maintain production level at around 325,000 barrels per day for another decade. Production continued to decline, reaching 159,300 barrels per day in 2019.
In order to try to maintain heavy crude production in the Bay of Campeche, PEMEX was focusing its efforts on the development of the Ku-Maloob-Zaap complex in an adjacent area, which can be connected to the existing facilities of Cantarell. Ku-Maloob-Zaap complex is expected to produce by the end of decade. In 2009, Ku-Maloob-Zaap replaced Cantarell as Mexico's most productive oil field.
See also
* List of oil fields
This list of oil fields includes some Giant oil and gas fields, major oil fields of the past and present.
The list is incomplete; there are more than 25,000 petroleum, oil and natural gas, gas Petroleum reservoir#gas field, fields of all sizes i ...
* Petroleum industry in Mexico
References
External links
Peak Oil is Now Official
by Trey Shaughnessy, 18 March 2006.
Rigzone Article on Decline
{{coord, 19, 45, 09, N, 92, 30, 58, W, region:MX_type:waterbody_source:kolossus-dewiki, display=title
Oil fields in Mexico
Petroleum industry in the Gulf of Mexico
Pemex