Mexico City, Mexico – Pemex, which announced its first deep-water crude oil discovery this past week, plans to operate the project and possibly ship the crude through Royal Dutch Shell facilities to refineries in the United States.

"One of the options to be analyzed is to connect our project to the existing pipelines in the US with a commercial agreement," Carlos Morales, head of exploration and production at the state oil company said Wednesday. "The other option is to install a floating production system on our side and ship the crude to Mexican refineries or to terminals in the US."

Pemex, the world’s fourth-largest crude producer, struck oil at the ultra-deep Trion-1 exploration well in the Perdido Fold Belt, a cross-border oil province in the Gulf of Mexico located about 200 miles off the Texas coast. Shell operates a platform with capacity to process as much as 100,000 barrels a day from oil produced in a 30-mile radius. Chevron and BP are Shell’s partners in the $3 billion facility.

The Mexican side of the Perdido field may hold as many as 10 billion barrels of potential reserves, with as much as 500 million coming from Trion, Morales said.

Pemex is counting on deep-water Gulf of Mexico deposits to increase production by a third in the next dozen years. The company estimates it has 27 billion barrels of untapped crude in the Gulf. They may begin adding about 20 percent of the discovered reserves as proven as early as this year, he said.

"This is a great discovery," President Felipe Calderón said after announcing the discovery. "It further strengthens our hydrocarbon reserves and allows Mexico to maintain and increase oil production in the medium and long term."

Trion is 8,333 feet deep and located 24 miles from the maritime border with the United States. If the 10 billion barrels prove to be recoverable, the Perdido area would be the biggest discovery by Pemex since Cantarell, the world’s third-largest field when it was found in 1976.

Pemex, which is based in Mexico City, expects to start producing sweet light oil from Trion in as soon as five years according to Morales.

Pemex invested $120 million in the Trion project, he said. On February 20th, Mexico and the United States agreed on a legal framework that created incentives for US energy companies to develop oil and gas resources jointly with Pemex.

The accord allows Pemex to classify oil extracted from the Mexican side of the Gulf and sent directly to US crude terminals as domestic production and exports. Pemex can also charge royalties on this output.

Pemex will develop the Trion project by itself and it may offer other fields in Perdido area to private operators, Morales said. The state-owned oil producer has used integrated service contracts since 2008 when Congress approved laws allowing private producers to control production projects without claiming it as reserves.