Companies

Sinopec to invest in Repsol unit

(China Daily)
Updated: 2010-10-02 09:25

Madrid - Chinese refiner Sinopec Group will invest $7.1 billion in Repsol YPF SA's Brazilian unit as the Spanish oil company raises funds to develop offshore projects in Brazil including the Guara and Carioca discoveries.

Sinopec will buy new shares in the Brazilian unit and will hold 40 percent of that division after the capital increase, Madrid-based Repsol said on Friday in an e-mailed statement. Repsol will hold the remaining 60 percent stake in the Brazilian unit. Its Brazilian assets are currently valued at $10.7 billion, Repsol said.

Related readings:  Chevron, Sinopec may join in shale gas deal  Sinopec cements natural gas moves  Tilted Sinopec oil platform to be salvaged; search continues for two missing workers  BP has declined Sinopec's offer to buy its assets

Repsol has stakes in blocks in Brazil's Santos, Campos and Espirito Santo basins, and has said it plans to invest as much as $5 billion there from 2010 through 2014, and as much as $9 billion from 2015 through 2019.

Since 2007, Repsol and partners BG Group Plc and Brazil's state-controlled Petroleo Brasileiro SA have found hydrocarbons in the offshore Carioca, Guara and Iguacu fields in the Santos Basin's BM-S-9 block. These are ultra-deep deposits beneath a salt layer under the seabed.

Petrobras, as Brazil's state-controlled oil company is known, estimated in November 2007 that the Santos Basin's pre-salt Tupi field may contain as many as 8 billion barrels of oil, the largest find in the Americas since Mexico's Cantarell field in 1976. Repsol doesn't own a stake in Tupi.

Bloomberg News