Australia's Woodside Energy is on track to make a final investment decision this year on the Trion offshore oil project, which would inaugurate production in the deep waters of the country's Gulf of Mexico.
[BHP Petroleum, now part of Woodside] partnered in 2017 with state-oil company Pemex, which discovered Trion's reserves five years earlier. The deal was part of a wide energy market reform that has been put mostly on hold by President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
Last year, Woodside delayed to this year a financial go-ahead on developing the $11 billion project, located at Mexico's Perdido basin and inherited from Australia's BHP, as costs have risen worldwide for manufacturing components for mega projects.
Trion, in which Woodside has a 60% stake, is expected to produce some 100,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil.
"We are very excited about Trion. We've completed the front-end engineering work on that asset, the reservoir is well appraised (and) we like the fiscal terms," Woodside Chief Executive Officer Meg O'Neill told Reuters on Tuesday in an interview on the sidelines of the CERAWeek conference in Houston.
"We expect that the project will meet our economic investment criteria," she added. "We'll be positioned to make an investment decision this year."
The firm is currently tendering for the project's floating production unit, a key to understanding its costs and designing the schedule outlook.
O'Neill said Pemex has supported completing required permits and meeting environmental regulations. "The strong partner support, I think, differentiates our project from others," she said.
Meanwhile, in Trinidad and Tobago, Woodside is moving toward a final investment decision at its Calypso offshore project, which could supply natural gas critical for restarting an idled liquefaction train in the Caribbean country. But a decision is not expected this year.
"We're in much earlier stage of the project. But the government is very supportive, and it is something that differentiates Trinidad and Tobago from many other places in the world," O'Neill said.
(Reporting by Marianna Parraga and Ron Bousso in Houston; Editing by David Gregorio)