The second largest producing field in the world is the Cantarell complex in Mexico. It lies 85 km from Ciudad del Carmen. The field was discovered in 1976 and put on production in 1979. This is one of the most geologically interesting oil fields because the producing formation was created when the Chicxulub meteor impacted the earth. The upper reservoir is a brecciated dolomite of Uppermost Cretaceous age. The breccia is from a shelf failure (underwater landslide) when the meteor hit. This 950 foot thick rubble became the reservoir for one of the biggest fields in the world. The lowermost part of the field is a Lower Cretaceous dolomitic limestone. The field is made up of a number of sub-fields or fault blocks. It has an overthrusted geological setting. These are Akal, Chac, Kutz and Nohoch. Akal was found first and the original well started producing at the rate of 34,000 barrels per day. Originally the field had 35 billion barrels of oil in place. Now, in place oil is not reserves. They expect to get around 50% of that oil out of the ground to market. The field reached an early peak in production of 1.1 million barrels per day in April of 1981 from 40 oil wells. By 1994 the production was down to 890,000 barrels of oil per day. At that time, cumulative production was 4.8 billion barrels. In 1995 it was producing 1 million barrels per day and the Mexican government decided to invest in that field to raise the production level. They built 26 new platforms, drilled lots of new wells and built the largest nitrogen extraction facility capable of injecting a billion cubic feet of nitrogen per day to maintain reservoir pressure. Doing this raised the oil production rate in 2001 to 2.2 million barrels per day. Presently, the field produces 2.1 million barrels.
Cantarell Oil, Gulf of Mexico, Pemex, America(North),