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Colombia must drill 60 wells per year for oil self-sufficiency
23-11-05 Colombia's government says the country must sign 30 oil-exploration contracts and drill 60 oil wells every year until 2020 to reverse a decline in oil output and reserves as well as to maintain its self-sufficiency in the commodity.
Colombia, Latin America's fifth-largest oil exporter, must discover at least 10 productive oil wells per year to increase average oil production to 700,000 bpd from 519,350 bpd in 2005, according to Armando Zamora, director of the government's National Hydrocarbon Association, or ANH.
Zamora said: "We are moving in that direction. We will soon discover oil."

ANH initially believed that Colombia would run out of oil in 2008, but government efforts to encourage private-sector companies to continue extracting from older oil wells until the last drop is extracted has pushed that eventuality back to 2011.
Colombia's government believes vast unexplored and potentially hydrocarbon-rich territories remain in the country, which shares many of the same geological features of oil-endowed neighbours Venezuela and Ecuador. In particular, the Llanos and Magdalena basins are thought to have great potential.
Zamora said eight of the 27 oil wells drilled so far this year showed strong signs of hydrocarbon presence.

Mauricio Salgar, chief operating officer at the state-owned oil company Ecopetrol, recently said two wells drilled in the Llanos basin -- the Vigia well drilled by London-based Emerald Energy and the Caricare well drilled by US oil company Occidental Petroleum -- have traces of hydrocarbons.
The other potentially productive wells are Guayuyaco, located in Putumayo state bordering Ecuador and under exploration by US-based Argosy Energy; Granadilla, located in the Magdalena basin and explored by Ecopetrol in association with Colombia's Hocol; and Cagui, located in the north-eastern state of Santander and explored by Ecopetrol.

Altogether, 30 oil wells are expected to be drilled this year, said Zamora. That will be the highest level in more than a decade.
Alejandro Martinez, president of the National Association of Oil, whose members include domestic and overseas private oil firms, believes it will take two more years to determine whether those wells contain oil or gas. But Martinez expects more than 45 oil wells to be drilled next year, "improving the possibility of finding oil."
Still, "no one guarantees that those fields contain hydrocarbons," he cautioned.

In addition, 10 international oil majors that currently have no operations in Colombia are actively looking for areas in the country to start exploration activities in 2006. Earlier this year, Zamora named Royal Dutch/Shell and Norway's Statoil as companies interested in hunting for oil in Colombia.
ANH's Zamora said companies from China, Europe and India and private Latin American companies are considering signing oil contracts next year. The country hopes to sign 47 oil contracts this year, 15 more than last year, and more than three times as many as in 2002, he said.


Source: Dow Jones Newswires