CARACAS, Feb 15: Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez said on Friday that he would invite foreign partners to bid on exploring a giant oil field in the country’s western Lake Maracaibo region.

The Tomoporo field, which the government says has more than 500 million barrels of crude in reserves, will give the world’s fifth largest oil exporter a boost in its non-heavy oil reserves that have declined in recent years.

Soon we will hold a first meeting with those companies of the world who want to come and start defining negotiations for Tomoporo, Chavez told an audience at a signing ceremony with foreign firms developing offshore natural gas.

Soon, this year, we should start Tomoporo, the leftist leader said.

Venezuela is struggling with an economic crisis amid a 10-week opposition strike that slashed its oil production and exports.

Opposition leaders are demanding Chavez resign and call early elections.

Analysts say Venezuela may have permanently lost from 350,000 to 400,000 barrels per day (bpd) of oil production capacity due to the strike. The Opec nation had output capacity of about 3.2 million bpd before the stoppage.

Older fields in the west, which require secondary recovery to pump, are expensive to bring back on line and state oil firm PDVSA may not have the funds necessary to restore them.

The Opec member’s reserves of lighter crudes have also fallen as old reservoirs dried up and spending cutbacks by PDVSA eroded the firm’s exploration and production budget.

The government has fired some 12,400 striking PDVSA staff, and PDVSA has had to cut its budget to help offset the financial crisis.

Foreign companies have complained that a nationalistic hydrocarbons law introduced by Chavez does not offer favorable conditions to invest in Venezuelan oil exploration.—Reuters