Sincor is one of our most ambitious projects. We faced unique upstream and downstream challenges in achieving the ambitious goal of transforming Venezuela’s gigantic Orinoco Belt extra-heavy crude oil reserves into a light syncrude for direct sale in international marketplaces.

An Ambitious Integrated Project
 
Sincor is a unique project that could not have been developed without recent specific advances in technology. It consists of:
• Producing an extra-heavy oil with a gravity of between 8 and 8.5°API.
• Fluidizing it onsite by adding a diluent (subsequently recycled) to make it transportable.
• Piping it over 200 kilometers to a processing plant.
• Upgrading it into a light synthetic crude (syncrude) with a low sulfur content, known as Zuata Sweet.

Involving a total investment of $4.2 billion and the combined deployment of upstream and downstream expertise, Sincor is a showcase for Total’s broad financial, marketing, managerial and technical capabilities. The project required the use of such cutting-edge processes as horizontal drilling, multiphase pumping and metering, real-time transmission and analysis of drilling and production data, and delayed coking.
 
In all, Sincor has enabled us to:
• Further strengthen our long-established Opco* experience, which was acquired primarily in the Middle East and will become increasingly important in the future.
• Gain proficiency in producing extra-heavy crude oil, which will be invaluable when developing similar projects, such as the Athabasca oil sands in Canada.
• Demonstrate our multi-faceted expertise in mega-project management and confirm our position as a key partner for national oil companies in producing countries.

A Multinational Project and a Fascinating Human Challenge
 
The Sincor project brought together a number of companies from a range of countries, with the project management team alone comprising 18 different nationalities. Some 10,000 people worked on the project.
 
Most production management operations will eventually be transferred to a primarily Venezuelan team. To ensure a seamless transition, managers recruited locally have been given special training in operating the installations.
 
In addition, the extensive construction phase, which lasted 42 months, was supported by a vast social program that included the building of schools, health care centers, roads and urban infrastructure.