US supermajor Chevron said on Friday it signed an agreement with Royal Dutch Shell to buy a 40% stake in three deepwater blocks on the Mexican Gulf.
The deal which was approved earlier this week by Mexico’s oil regulator, the National Hydrocarbon Commission, will see Chevron farming into Areas 20, 21, and 23.
“This agreement further strengthens the company’s upstream Mexico portfolio and advances its growth strategy in deepwater exploration,” Chevron’s spokesman, Ray Fohr, said in a statement, but did not disclose the value of the deal.
Chevron’s Mexico unit is the lead operator of two consortiums for exploring and developing deepwater blocks in the Mexican Gulf: one in block 3 of Perdido Basin and the other in block 22 of Salina Basin.
For Area 20, a frontier block off the state of Veracruz, Shell anticipates beginning a drilling push as early as the fourth quarter of 2019 and lasting through 2020, Upstream said in a report Friday.
Shell won approval from Mexico’s oil regulator earlier this year to invest $2.4 billion in a drilling plan that can include up to 13 deepwater wells in Mexico over the next four years.
