Wintershall is expanding its activities in South America: The wholly owned BASF subsidiary has for the first time been awarded an exploration license in Chile. Wintershall will begin exploration work in the Magellan Basin in the South of Chile this year together with South American company GeoPark Holdings Limited and the Methanex Corporation. Wintershall and GeoPark each have a 42 percent stake in the consortium and Methanex holds the remaining 16 percent. The consortium was awarded the license for the Otway Block, which has a surface area of 6,000 square kilometers, in the first international bidding round for explora-tion concessions by the Chilean government. At least 30 million US dollars will be invested in the exploration of this block.

“With the commencement of exploration activities in Chile we are expand-ing our portfolio in South America, which is one of our core regions”, Dr. Ties Tiessen, Member of the Board of Executive Directors of Wintershall Holding AG responsible for Production, explained. “We already have the first geological and geophysical data for the block. We will carefully ana-lyze this data and conduct 2D and 3D seismic surveys to identify drilling projects”, Dr Tiessen said. Methanex, which is based in Vancouver, pro-duces, supplies and markets methanol and is an important client of Winter-shall and GeoPark. GeoPark is a South American oil and gas producer with concessions in Argentina and Chile and the only private-sector oil and gas producer in Chile.