Mobil Consortium to Drill in Vietnam : Energy: U.S. firm, which holds 50% interest in group, is first American company to return to shores of former foe.

Mobil Corp. said Monday that it is part of a consortium that has been awarded offshore oil drilling rights by Vietnam, making it the first U.S. company since the Vietnam War to return to its potentially oil-rich shores.

Fairfax, Va.-based Mobil said the consortium, which includes three Japanese companies, will explore and do “appraisal drilling” in a block located 175 miles southeast of the Mekong Delta. This is the same area where Mobil struck oil and began drilling toward the end of the Vietnam War. John Lord, a Mobil spokesman, said that the area is considered to be “highly prospective”--a term used to describe areas believed to contain substantial quantities of oil or natural gas. Mobil said it holds a 50% interest in the consortium, which will immediately begin talks with the Vietnamese over the details of production sharing.

Mobil received a license from the Treasury Department authorizing the company to participate in the bid for the offshore block, seismic information gathering, and exploration and appraisal drilling. But because the United States still imposes a trade embargo against Vietnam, Mobil cannot go beyond appraisal drilling into the stage that would produce oil in commercial quantities.

“We can’t at this point make money off it,” Lord said.

Since 1988, Vietnam has awarded 25 offshore exploration contracts to foreign companies. But the country has only one functioning oil field, run by a Russian-Vietnamese venture 75 miles off the Vietnam coast. This is a field that Mobil discovered in the days before the spring of 1975, when the U.S.-backed South Vietnamese government fell.

Vietnamese officials at the United Nations first approached Mobil about the possibility of moving back into Vietnam more than three years ago, Mobil officials said.

Vietnamese officials have repeatedly said they want U.S. companies to return to Vietnam because of their advanced technology and knowledge of where the oil is.

The Vietnamese late last year estimated their oil reserves at more than 4 billion barrels, but the World Bank more recently reported estimated potential reserves of 8 billion barrels.

The World Bank said that the importance of crude oil to the Vietnamese economy is considerable. In 1990, the bank said, crude oil generated about $400 million in foreign exchange earnings, representing about 22% of the country’s total export earnings and about 19% of government revenues.

In October, a Vietnam veterans group, VietNow in Rockford, Ill., protested a reception that Mobil held in the old South Vietnamese presidential palace in Ho Chi Minh City because the nation has not accounted for American soldiers missing in action during the war.

Mobil apologized for “any anguish” that the symbolism of the reception might have caused. But the veterans group said it was not appeased and organized a demonstration denouncing Mobil.