Caracas, May 6 (<a href=quote.bloomberg.com>Bloomberg) -- Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the state oil company, plans to boost production by about 2 million barrels a day by 2008, the Houston Chronicle said, citing Chief Executive Ali Rodriguez at a conference in Houston.
Oil production in Venezuela, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries' third-largest producer, is now 3.2 million barrels a day, the paper said, citing Rodriguez. This number includes discoveries, such as a field south of Lake Maracaibo that could hold as much as 1 billion barrels, according to Rodriguez.
Petroleos de Venezuela is in the midst of a five-year plan intended to boost its production capacity to 5.1 million barrels a day, the Houston Chronicle said, citing Rodriguez.
Venezuela's oil exports were slashed when nationwide strikes began on Dec. 2, aimed to forcing President Hugo Chavez from office. Petroleos de Venezuela fired more than half of its pre- strike employees of 33,000 during the work stoppage.
(Houston Chronicle 5-6)
Last Updated: May 6, 2003 20:18 EDT
Tom Blackwell
<a href=www.nationalpost.com>National Post
Wednesday, May 07, 2003
A revised case definition of SARS may be excluding many people who have the virus, raising questions about whether quarantines are catching all those who could potentially spread the disease, according to a paper published yesterday by Canadian scientists.
The research paper, published yesterday in the online version of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), marks the second recent suggestion by experts that the ailment lurks in a significant number of individuals who do not meet the classic profile of a SARS patient.
A Health Canada scientist said last week that lab tests had found the strain of coronavirus thought to trigger the illness in 14% of patients deemed not to have SARS.
The JAMA paper, written by researchers at several Toronto hospitals and the University of Toronto, looked at 144 cases of the city's outbreak.
It notes the current case definition used worldwide excludes "a significant number" of people who have fever and had possible contact with SARS but no respiratory symptoms, such as a dry cough or shortness of breath. Such people would not be considered probable or suspect cases.
"This has important public health implications," the authors wrote. "Such individuals may actually have acquired the virus that causes SARS without developing the full syndrome. Accordingly, they and their contacts may require quarantine."
The cases examined by the group were all classed as probable or suspect SARS cases based on an early definition from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. But under the criteria now used by Health Canada, the CDC and the World Health Organization, 16 would not be considered SARS cases, the paper said.
Dr. Frank Plummer, head of Health Canada's national microbiology lab in Winnipeg, said last week there is concern the non-SARS patients who tested positive for the coronavirus may be able to infect others, but there is no evidence yet of that happening.
Meanwhile, the outbreak showed further signs of weakening in Ontario yesterday, as the number of probable cases under treatment dropped by two to 29.
But more than a dozen countries seem to have doubts about Canada's safety. A week after the WHO lifted its controversial advisory against non-essential travel to Toronto, several countries still have similar alerts in effect about the city, according to Foreign Affairs Department records. They include South Korea, Venezuela and small nations that do not produce many visitors to Canada: Cayman Islands, Kuwait, Lebanon, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Nepal and Singapore.
Another group of countries has advisories that suggest their citizens avoid visiting Canada altogether, the Foreign Affairs records indicate. They are: Bhutan, Cooke Islands, Jordan, Libya, Malaysia, Mongolia, Panama, Uruguay, Vietnam and Yemen.
Foreign Affairs continues to tell nations there is no reason to restrict travel to Toronto, Reynald Doiron, a department spokesman, said.
Tourism Toronto is also spreading the word, writing to all Canadian missions abroad and to foreign embassies in Canada to point out the current status of the outbreak, Bruce MacMillan, president of the tourism agency, said.
"We've been successful in many cases and not in others," he said.
A major drug company yesterday addressed another fall-out of the epidemic: skin irritations suffered by health care workers who have to repeatedly wash their hands and use harsh antiseptics.
Pfizer Canada donated 40,000 tubes of its Lubriderm skin lotion, with a retail value of $120,000, to several Toronto hospitals.
HOUSTON, May 6 (Reuters) - Oil companies will have to prospect in new regions while developing new technologies to maximize production if they hope to meet exploding energy demand in the coming decades, Royal Dutch/Shell's exploration and production head said on Tuesday.
Drastic declines in oil and gas fields in the United States and United Kingdom are making geographic diversity crucial to meeting that demand, Shell Exploration and Production chief executive Walter van de Vijver said.
"That will force us to go into areas we haven't been before but also will force us more and more into OPEC countries while seeing some major countries ... that will be the real growth areas of the future," van de Vijver told an audience of oil executives at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.
By 2030, Shell <RD.AS> <SHEL.L> sees Russia as the largest growth prospect in terms of oil production, followed by Kazakhstan, Mexico, China, Azerbaijan and Angola. Iran has the largest growth prospects for natural gas, followed by Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Nigeria, Venezuela and Norway, he said.
But while the industry will shift money and effort into new producing regions, it must also spend the money to develop new technologies to maximize production capabilities, he said.
A key example of that is in deepwater drilling, which is one of the last frontiers left in the Gulf of Mexico's fast-declining fields. Deepwater drilling is expensive by dint of the tremendous technological resources required.
Most players have deepwater reserves that are four times their current annual production, so bringing the production online is critical, van de Vijver said.
"It is still going to be very difficult for the future to be able to deliver those reserves and the technology required to do so," van de Vijver said.
Oil companies must also develop technologies to help them increase their returns from declining wells, he said.
<a href=www.lapress.org>LatinoAmericaPress.orgAndrés Cañizález. May 6, 2003
Democratic Coordinating Group loses influence and moderates stance.
Since the unsuccessful coup attempt against President Hugo Chávez of April 22, 2002 (LP, April 22, 2002), the opposition Democratic Coordinating Group (DCG) has tried in various ways to bring about the downfall of the President: proposals to cut short the presidential term; constitutional reform; the creation of a new Constituent Assembly. None of them have worked.
Now, following an April 11 preliminary agreement between the government and the opposition, a referendum is likely to be held on the future of Chávez as President. It was Chávez who incorporated this mechanism in the 1999 Constitution, applicable to any elected public figure (LP, Dec. 27, 1999).
<a href=news.ft.com>Financial Times (subscription), UK - 6 May 2003
By Alex Skorecki. Venezuela has been dropped by index company FTSE from its All World index following exchange controls imposed in January. ...