HAVANA – A third attempt to find oil in the Gulf of Mexico off Cuba has failed, the state oil company said Friday, announcing yet another setback to efforts to tap huge petroleum reserves.

The latest company to come up empty-handed, Venezuelan oil giant PDVSA, will keep working with Cuba to explore for oil, Cubapetroleo said in a statement published in the official newspaper Granma.

“Although this well doesn’t offer possibilities for commercial exploitation, the results of the scan will help guide and expand operations in blocs of Cuba’s exclusive economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico,” Cubapetroleo said.

PDVSA was called in after the announcement in June that Spanish energy company Repsol, which used the Scarabeo 9 offshore platform to drill for oil in a block assigned to it off Havana, was abandoning its efforts after failing to find oil.

In August, a Russian-Malaysian consortium also failed to find oil and the Scarabeo platform was passed to Venezuela’s PDVSA.

Cubapetroleo said Friday the platform will now be shut down, but insisted technical expertise and valuable geological information were obtained.

These, it said, “have contributed to affirming the decision of PDVSA to continue its participation in the exploration campaign in Cuban waters.”

Economist Oscar Espinosa Chepe said the failure to find oil is a huge setback for Havana, which has struggled to surmount the economic crisis of the past two decades, and had hoped to achieve energy self-sufficiency.

“It is really a huge blow for Cuba, because the only hope that we have of improving our economic situation, which gets worse each day, is to find oil,” he told AFP.

“Unfortunately, we don’t have the world’s best technology, which they have in North America,” he added.

“I think the Cuban government has to make an effort to hold talks with the United States, which would be a much better partner for this sort of endeavor,” Espinosa said.

Cuba’s economic zone in the Gulf of Mexico was divided into 59 blocs, 22 of which were put under contract to companies from Angola, India, Malaysia, Norway, Russia, Spain, Venezuela and Vietnam.

Some studies estimate the 112,000-square-kilometer (43,243-square-mile) area has probable reserves of between five and nine billion barrels of crude oil, although Cuban authorities say there could be as many as 20 billion barrels.

Cuba produces oil from wells on land and in shallow water, but they are reaching their capacity limits.

It also imports 100,000 barrels of oil a day from close ally Venezuela, which supplies oil to Cuba on easy terms.

— AFP