As it prepares to open its enterprise to outside contractors, Mexico’s Petroleos Mexicanos Exploration & Production (Pemex E&P) has signed a $60 million, two-year contract with Schlumberger Ltd. to manage its upstream asset information.

Among other things, Schlumberger will provide lifecycle information management and change management expertise to enable Pemex E&P enhanced data access, administration and analysis. Pemex E&P is a division of Pemex, the state-owned petroleum company.

In February, Pemex said it was moving forward on its proposed multiple service contracts (MSCs), which will allow outside contracts to invest privately in the country’s E&P sector (see Daily GPI, Feb. 19). The first MSCs are scheduled to be announced in September, and will be worth about $8 billion in development contracts to private companies. The 10- to 20-year contracts would be awarded for production of non-associated natural gas from the Burgos field in northeastern Mexico.

“Information management is a key component of the Pemex technical computing strategy,” said Jose Luis Figueroa, manager of the Pemex E&P information management project. He said E&P professionals will have access to petro-technical, financial, production and portfolio data to enable them to make better business decisions and develop new opportunities more rapidly.

Data will be integrated and consolidated into a virtual repository, which involves capturing, digitizing and scanning/indexing E&P information and associated physical assets, such as cores, fluid samples, sieves and thin sections. The common data model will use defined standards and international best practices.

“Pemex has embarked on a business transformation that will undoubtedly have a tremendous impact on the E&P industry in Mexico, and we are pleased to have the opportunity to support these efforts,” said Jose Magela Bernardes, Schlumberger’s general manager in Mexico. “The success of this type of project is highly dependent on the team’s ability to address all change management aspects from technical to people issues to enhance efficiency and enable more accurate decisions in a timely manner, while maintaining the integrity and value of data — the most important asset in the E&P business.”

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