Venezuela touts LNG growth despite Deltana results

By Robert Campbell

LA JOLLA, Calif., May 14 (Reuters) - Venezuela presented its latest plan to become a major exporter of liquefied natural gas (LNG) on Wednesday despite disappointing results for a highly anticipated offshore natural gas drilling campaign.

The South American energy giant is close to selecting partners to build two 4.7-million-tonne-per-year LNG liquefaction trains and aims to be exporting gas by the end of 2014 at the latest, said a senior executive with Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA.

"We are in the process of selecting our partners ... and hope to begin (engineering studies) in the third or fourth quarter," Ruben Figuera said in a speech at a conference hosted by the Institute of the Americas.

Venezuela has long harbored ambitions of becoming a major natural gas exporter since the large Mariscal Sucre gas fields were discovered north of the Paria Peninsula in the mid-1980s.

A drilling program in the nearby Deltana Platform area was also supposed to add nearly 40 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves to support a major expansion of the industry, but the results of the exploration campaign fell short.

Proven reserves in the four Deltana blocks where exploratory wells were drilled total only 6.4 trillion cubic feet, the bulk of which is in Chevron Corp's (CVX.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Block 2, where the Loran field was found.

Loran is believed to hold 5.7 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves. Block 4, operated by StatoilHydro AS (STL.OL: Quote, Profile, Research) of Norway, holds only 200 billion cubic feet of proven reserves, according to Figuera's presentation at the conference.

"These are the numbers the companies presented," Figuera told reporters after his speech. "There is enough gas there for a project."