Banco Santander officially opened the sale and assignment process of 55 conventional areas operated by YPF in six oil provinces: Chubut, Santa Cruz, Neuquén, Mendoza, Río Negro and Tierra del Fuego. The initiative was baptised within the oil company as ‘Andes Project’.
The entity sent to interested companies an initial presentationthat lists the mature fields that YPF intends to divest under the umbrella of the strategic plan designed by the company’s president and CEO, Horacio Marin, which foresees these fields to be exploited by smaller or independent operators focused on the productive efficiency of reservoirs that have been in activity for decades. EconoJournal accessed the document that describes the clusters in which the areas YPF plans to divest are grouped. The state-controlled oil company plans to officially announce the launch of the process on Monday.
The documentation sent by Banco Santander, which will be in charge of the sale process, is only a first formal contact with potential buyers. Those interested will have to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) in order to access the data room with the technical and economic data of the areas, as well as the conditions of sale defined by YPF. After that, interested parties will have about 30 more days to formulate concrete offers for each of those areas. YPF’s objective is to try to finalise the process in July. The withdrawal of the company’s mature fields had been approved by the company’s board last March.
Interested parties must bid for the entire cluster of blocks, which are defined in the file sent by Santander The only province for which no information has yet been released is Santa Cruz, as YPF is still finalising discussions with the governor’s office headed by Claudio Vidal on how the sale process will be structured in that province. It is likely that most of the blocks operated by YPF will revert to Fomicruz, the provincial company of Santa Cruz, so that the public company will be in charge of relisting the areas.
SOURCE: econojournal.com.ar