HA­VANA, Cu­ba–A Russ­ian state oil com­pa­ny drilling off Cu­ba's north­ern shores says it is tem­porar­i­ly halt­ing its ex­plo­ration.Zarubezh­neft said it was halt­ing work be­cause of "ge­o­log­i­cal" prob­lems but will re­sume oil ex­plo­ration next year. The an­nounce­ment sig­nalled an end to the on­ly ac­tive ex­plo­ration pro­gramme in Cu­ba, which now re­lies on heav­i­ly sub­si­dized oil from Venezuela.

Cu­ba re­port­ed­ly de­pends on an es­ti­mat­ed 96,000 bar­rels of oil it re­ceives dai­ly from Venezuela, which amounts to about two-thirds of its con­sump­tion.

The Rus­sians' with­draw­al comes as the Nor­we­gian com­pa­ny that owns the drilling plat­form they have been leas­ing, the Songa Mer­cur, said it would be leav­ing Cuban wa­ters in Ju­ly for an­oth­er con­tract. The US Ge­o­log­i­cal Sur­vey has es­ti­mat­ed that Cu­ba's off­shore wa­ters have "sig­nif­i­cant undis­cov­ered con­ven­tion­al oil po­ten­tial"–be­tween 4.6 bil­lion and 9.3 bil­lion bar­rels. Cuban of­fi­cials es­ti­mate the po­ten­tial re­serves at 20 bil­lion.

Cu­ba's oil ex­plo­rations have caused con­cern among US en­vi­ron­men­tal­ists and tourism of­fi­cials, claim­ing that any spills would im­pact the en­tire East­ern Seaboard, from the Flori­da Keys to Cape Cod in Mass­a­chu­setts.

CMC