September
11, 2003
Venezuela´s PDVSA seeks
in Wall Street financing for CIGMA gas project
By Elio Ohep of Petroleumworld
(Petroleumworld.com) - Executive´s from
Venezuela´s oil company PDVSA are meeting
this week with Wall Street banks and other financing
institutions seeking to loans for the $2.7 billion
CIGMA gas project in Venezuela, Dow Jones Newswires
reported.
PDVSA´s executive held meetings on September
10 with executives at Citigroup, and were scheduled
to speak with ABN Amro and Merrill Lynch, and
J.P. Morgan Chase, according to Dow Jones. Nelson
Martínez, a director at PDVSA, said he
and other PDVSA´s executives were to meet
with New York banks and also the Export-import
Bank to present the opportunities for the project.
"We are looking for ways for them to help
us finance the project," Martínez
told Dow Jones Newswires. "We are considering
bonds or commercial loans," and are now defining
the financing strategy to pursue, he added. Martínez
added that next week, the group will go to Japan
to present the project to the banking community
there.
The CIGMA project, is an industrial petrochemical
complex with a base for liquefying natural gas
or LNG for export to the eastern U.S., is part
of the Mariscal Sucre LNG Project, with estimated
gas reserves 12 trillion cubic feet, in the northeastern
part of Venezuela that should come on stream by
2008 with production of 1 billion standard cubic
feet a day.
The Mariscal Sucre project aims to develop four
non-associated offshore natural gas fields located
to the north of the Paria Peninsula in northeast
Venezuela to be process in the Cigma complex.
The Mariscal Sucre Project shareholders are PDVSA
GAS with a 60% stake; Royal Dutch/Shell Group
with 30%; Mitsubishi Corp. with 8%; and other
with 2%.
