June 18 (<a href=quote.bloomberg.com>Bloomberg) -- Petroleos de Venezuela SA, the state oil company, will resume exports of reformulated gasoline from its Paraguana refinery on Sunday, almost seven months after they were halted because of a nationwide work stoppage.

A shipment of 300,000 barrels will be sent to the U.S. east coast, said a Petroleos de Venezuela spokesman at Paraguana, the world's largest refinery complex. The shipment was supposed to go out a month ago but was repeatedly delayed because of planned maintenance at the Puerto La Cruz refinery, said the spokesman.

The shutdown of the Puerto La Cruz refinery meant that the gasoline that had been slated to be shipped was kept back for domestic use, the spokesman said. The Puerto La Cruz refinery resumed production last week.

Exports from Paraguana, which includes the Amuay and Cardon refineries, were slashed in December when a nationwide strike began. The refinery resumed operations in April, two months after the end of the strike, which was aimed at ousting President Hugo Chavez.

Paraguana exported about 3 million barrels of gasoline, all conventional unleaded, in April and May. Reformulated gasoline, which is especially blended to reduce tailpipe emissions, is more difficult to produce.

BY MARK SHENK <a href=www.nwanews.com>BLOOMBERG NEWS Posted on Wednesday, June 11, 2003

Crude oil rose to a 12-week high Tuesday as fires closed units at Louisiana refineries operated by Exxon Mobil Corp. and Murphy Oil Corp., raising concerns of possible limited gasoline supplies during the fuel’s busiest season.

U.S. gasoline inventories, for the week that ended May 30, were down 4 percent from a year earlier, Energy Department figures show. Refiners that week operated at 98 percent of capacity, a two-year high. "When refineries are running at such a high rate there are going to be problems," said Ed Silliere, vice president of risk management at Energy Merchant LLC in New York, a gasoline and heating oil marketer. "You can expect to see units blow up."

Crude oil for July delivery rose 28 cents, or 0.9 percent, to $31.73 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, the highest closing price since March 17.

Oil had fallen as low as $30.90 a barrel before the rally, after OPEC officials, gathering in Doha, Qatar, for a meeting today, said they saw no need to cut oil output quotas.

Meantime, gasoline for July delivery rose 2.06 cents, or 2.3 percent, to 91.71 cents a gallon in New York, the highest close since March 31. U.S. gasoline demand peaks during the vacation season, which runs from Memorial Day in May to Labor Day in early September. "Gasoline has been a steadying influence on the crude-oil market," said Tom Bentz, an oil broker at BNP Paribas Commodity Futures Inc. in New York. "When crude oil was falling flat on its face earlier today, gasoline limited the decline."

Exxon Mobil said a fire broke out Tuesday at a coker unit in its Chalmette, La., refinery. All other units at the refinery were operating normally, spokesman Kimberly Brasington said. The refinery, a joint venture with Venezuela’s state oil company Petroleos de Venezuela SA, can process 180,000 barrels of crude oil a day.

Murphy Oil, which is based in El Dorado, Ark., shut its refinery in Meraux, La., after a fire broke out in the residual-oil supercritical extraction and vacuum units about 2 a.m. Tuesday, according to a company statement. The fire in the vacuum unit was extinguished by 5:15 a.m., and Murphy said Tuesday afternoon that the fire in the extraction unit also was out.

Two employees suffered minor injuries at the refinery, which can process about 100,000 barrels of crude a day.

The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries is unlikely to change oil-output quotas as long as oil prices stay within a range of $22 to $28 a barrel, OPEC Secretary-General Alvaro Silva Calderon said Tuesday in Qatar. OPEC’s basket of seven crude oils averaged $27.53 a barrel Monday.

OPEC, which produces a third of the world’s oil, had considered cutting output to make room for renewed exports from Iraq, where the U.S.-led invasion in March halted shipments.

June 10 (<a href=quote.bloomberg.com>Bloomberg) -- Repsol YPF SA, Europe's fifth-largest oil company, plans to invest as much as $700 million in Venezuela through 2008 to boost oil production in the South American country.

Miguel Angel Remon, Repsol's vice-president for exploration and production, discussed the investment during a presentation yesterday in Madrid, a Repsol press officer said. Remon didn't provide further details.

The newspaper Expansion today reported that Repsol is in talks with the Venezuelan government to invest about $700 million in an oil project that would double its production in the country.

Madrid-based Repsol may buy as much as 49 percent of a drilling project on the east side of Lake Maracaibo that has a potential output of 250,000 barrels a day, the newspaper said, citing Venezuelan energy officials who visited Madrid yesterday. Repsol currently produces about 100,000 barrels a day in Venezuela, Expansion said.

Repsol in April said it planned to invest an average 3.5 billion euros annually in coming years to boost output in Latin America and North Africa and expand its natural gas business.

El Universal, Executive Daily news and Summary

"Customers of Venezuela's Pdvsa are reporting renewed difficulties securing crude from Pdvsa, stoking fears that the country's output figures are inflated," Petroleum Argus says this week.

According to the oil bulletin, term buyers have expressed growing frustration with the situation. "Even Pdvsa's affiliates in the US have been forced to look for an alternative supply."

It adds that buyers complain they have been unable to get straight answers on how much oil they can receive, and some say it is a challenge even contacting Pdvsa's traders. "A Latin American trader says it now takes weeks to do deals with Pdvsa, where it used to take days, asserting that politicization and bureaucracy at Pdvsa are out of control."

"Us refiners have asked Mexico if it can supply more crude to make up Venezuelan shortfalls. But Pemex says it has no crude to spare, and cannot help. Russian Urals is filling some of the gap. Citgo and its Lyondell-Citgo sister have bought large volumes of Urals arriving this month and next, and are also seeking heavy crude in the Americas."

Argus also says that speculation that Venezuelan crude output is well below the 3.1 mn b/d claimed last month by Pdvsa's president Alí Rodríguez are increasing. "One rival says that Venezuela's output is no higher than 2.6 mn-2.7 mn b/d, and some of this is coming from Caribbean storage rather than Venezuelan fields."

• To combat bacteria that cause illnesses such as meningitis and pneumonia • The first significant Cuban biotechnological product to originate from university laboratories

BY LILLIAM RIERA —Granma International staff writer—

FROM the age of two months, breastfed babies are to be immunized with a Cuban vaccine (Hib) to fight B-type Haemophilus influenza, the bacteria that causes a significant percentage of meningitis, pneumonia and otitis cases and is responsible for the deaths of half a million children a year worldwide.

Vincente Vérez Bencomo, a researcher at the Faculty of Chemistry of the University of Havana who developed the vaccine, told Granma International that “using the Hib vaccine as part of the National Immunization Program will reduce imports and save the country between two and three million dollars.”

He explained that the product will be administered to babies at two, four and six months after birth, with a booster dose at 18 months. The vaccine is currently in the final registration stage with the State Center for Medication Control (CECMED) after a total of six clinical trials.

He also stated that national demand for the vaccine will be met this year in terms of production and that “in 2004, we might begin to export the product.”

Other vaccines to combat B-type Haemophilus influenza and manufactured through the cultivation of this bacteria are sold throughout the world but Vérez Bencomo explained that this is the first of its kind to be produced synthetically in the laboratory.

He recalled that the team from the University of Havana has been working on the vaccine since 1989 and that this is the “first significant product to originate from university laboratories, highlighting that its “development is the fruit of joint work between the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center, the Finlay Institute and the Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine, amongst other scientific bodies.”

Vérez Bencomo indicated that in conjunction with a Canadian university, the patented product has been launched in more than 30 countries including Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Colombia, India, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand, the Czech Republic, South Africa, Ukraine, Venezuela and the United States.