By William Jones, Contributing Reporter
RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – OGX has revealed that they have started pumping crude oil in the Turbarão Martelo oil field after numerous failures which have dragged the company to the brink of extinction. Millionaire Eike Batista’s flagship oil company’s stock has plummeted by an incredible 95 percent this year, but markets showed stock surging sixteen percent after the announcement.
“Production started yesterday at the Tubarão Martelo field,” read an OGX statement. According to the Brazilian oil giant, they expect that Campo de Tubarão Martelo (Hammerhead shark oil field) will provide 87.9 million barrels of oil in total.
This is a stark contrast to figures OGX previously disclosed in 2012 when the company announced that the field would provide 285 million barrels, triple the amount that is now estimated. This means that the value of the field located in the Santos basin could potentially reach the value of US$11.2 billion.
OGX, headed by entrepreneur Eike Batista, observed the company falling into creditor protection after numerous failures within attempts to produce crude oil which saw the first Brazilian oil producer of its kind to apply for bankruptcy before a Rio de Janeiro court in November. Experts have suggested that OGX will run out of funds to continue operations by the last week of December, leaving them in search of an estimated US$250 million in order to sustain their production.
The time in which it will take for OGX to continue pumping oil and certify the amount of barrels they can produce will be significant, which will have a sapping effect on the company’s increasingly emptying resources. “Some fields Petrobras already produce in have been operating for twenty years,” explained Marcelo Colomer to Jornal do Brasil, a researcher in the group of energy economics at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which spells a difficult yet interesting period for Batista’s OGX in the coming months.
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