Petroleos de Venezuela SA and state-run Vietnam Oil and Gas Group (PetroVietnam) have agreed to join a project to upgrade the country’s sole refinery. They will work together, selling refined oil products to the Asian market. The PetroVietnam-PDVSA refinery agreement coincides a string of similar multi-billion-dollar pacts seen elsewhere in Asia, where out-of-region oil producers enter local refining projects to take advantage the rapidly growing Asian demand for refined products. By the third quarter of 2012, PDVSA aims to pump an initial 50,000 barrels of heavy crude oil a day as part of a joint venture development with Vietnam of the offshore Junin-2 block in Venezuela. Output is expected to climb four times that volume by 2014. With PetroVietnam, PDVSA intends to expand output at the country’s sole refinery by 100,000 barrels a day.
