Cuba says latest offshore well is not successful

Cuba's hopes for energy independence suffered another blow on Monday when its state oil company said the island's latest offshore oil well was not successful.

Cubapetroleo said the well drilled by Malaysia's state-owned Petronas in partnership with Russia's Gazprom Neft found oil but in a geological formation so tightly compacted that oil and gas could not flow through it in "significant quantities."

"It cannot be qualified as a commercial discovery," the company said in an announcement in the Communist Party newspaper Granma.

It was the third failed well in three attempts in Cuba's part of the Gulf of Mexico, where the communist country has said it may have 20 billion barrels of oil.

The government led by President Raul Castro needs the oil to free it from dependence on socialist ally Venezuela, which under an oil-for-services deal sends Cuba about 115,000 barrels of oil daily.

With Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez battling cancer and facing re-election in October, the future of his oil largess for Cuba is uncertain.

Cuba produces about 50,000 barrels a day from onshore wells, but it consumes an estimated 147,000 barrels daily and refines most of the rest for sale to other Caribbean countries.

Spanish oil company Repsol hit a dry hole in Cuban waters in May and said it would likely pull out of the country after 12 years of operations, two unsuccessful wells and expenditures of $125 million.

Its first well, drilled in 2004, found oil but, like the Petronas well, was deemed not commercially viable.

Repsol's recent well, drilled north of Havana in partnership with Norway's Statoil and ONGC Videsh, a unit of India's ONGC, found no hydrocarbons at all.

Cubapetroleo said the Petronas well, completed on July 31, was drilled west of the Cuban capital in 7,408 feet (2,258 meters) of water, much deeper than Cuban and Petronas officials previously had suggested.