A Japanese company will loan Venezuela $1 billion to develop its stalled, 14.7 trillion cubic feet Mariscal Sucre offshore gas project, oil minister Rafael Ramirez said in a newspaper report today. "We have been looking for partners in Mariscal Sucre. We received notification from a Japanese firm that will offer a loan of $1 billion to develop the project and we are looking for a large company that could be Gazprom," he said in the Ultimas Noticias daily. He did not say which Japanese company he was referring to, or give further details of a possible partnership with Russia's Gazprom, according to a Reuters report.
Venezuela this year closed an auction for the project after failing to receive any offers despite improving the conditions. Since then it has been trying to negotiate directly with companies to attract them to the field in the Caribbean sea. Venezuela needs more natural gas for electricity generation and household usage, but a requirement to sell a proportion of the gas produced from the project at cheap prices to the domestic market is unattractive to many firms.
State-run PDVSA invited a group of companies including Japan's Marubeni, Mitsui , Mitsubishi and Itochu, Norway's Statoil, Russia's Gazprom and Italy's Eni to take part in last year's auction. Earlier negotiations on Sucre with Shell, ExxonMobil, Mitsubishi and Petrobras fell through in 2007. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited Venezuela last week to discuss oil, defense and nuclear energy cooperation.
