Colombia will reach the milestone of 1 million barrels a days of oil production within weeks, Mines and Energy Minister Mauricio Cardenas said Wednesday.
Colombia
will
reach the milestone of 1 million barrels a days of oil production within weeks,
Mines and Energy Minister Mauricio Cardenas said Wednesday.
"We are about 20,000 barrels a day short of that now. It is going to be
soon, a matter of weeks,"
Cardenas
said.
"The target is to reach 1.5 million barrels by 2020, but to really become
an oil power you need more reserves than we have now. Getting more reserves is
the name of the game now in
Colombia
,"
he told Dow Jones Newswires.
The minister was speaking in Beijing on the sidelines of a state visit to China
by President Juan Manuel Santos aimed at boosting Chinese investment in the
country, including in an oil and gas licensing round due to be decided in
November.
"We have two major objectives here in
China
--one
is to increase exploration by the two Chinese companies already active in
Colombia
and
the other is to discuss the 109 blocks being offered. There are four or five
companies in
China
interested in bidding for those blocks,"
Cardenas
said.
The two are China Petrochemical Corp., known as Sinopec Group, which in 2006
acquired an $800 million stake in Colombian oil producer Orimex, and Sinochem
International Corp., which in 2009 took over Emerald Energy PLC and its
properties in
Colombia
and
Syria
for
$867 million.
Sinochem expanded its holdings in February by buying oil, gas and pipeline
assets from Total SA (TOT).
Of the blocks on offer, around 30 are for unconventional hydrocarbons, and
these had drawn the interest of major
US
companies including Exxon Mobil Corp. (XOM), ConocoPhillips (COP) and Chevron
Corp. (CVX), and some Chinese companies, he said.
Cardenas
said his talks in
China
also
covered the possibility of Sinochem joining a project to build a long-haul oil
export pipeline from
Venezuela
to
Colombia
's
coast.
The possibility of joining
Venezuela
and
Ecuador
in
becoming a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries had been
suggested during recent talks in
Caracas
,
"but we are not thinking about that yet. We would have to analyse the
costs and benefits."
Colombia
produced 950,939 barrels of oil a day in March, a 7.2% increase from a year
earlier, the government said last month. The rise was helped by the
government's success in limiting attacks by Marxist guerrillas on energy
facilities.
Colombia
has
seen a big inflow of foreign investment to develop its oil and natural-gas
industries in recent years as a result of the government's market-friendly
policies and territorial advances against insurgents in the country's mountains
and jungles.
Colombia
's
national oil company, Ecopetrol SA (EC), accounts for 60% of the country's
total production.
China
's
crude imports from
Colombia
in
the first quarter of 2012 averaged just 56,000 barrels a day--a drop in the
bucket compared with
China
's
average January-March imports of 5.69 million barrels a day.
Διαβάστε ακόμα
Τρι, 24 Σεπτεμβρίου 2024 - 19:58
Τρι, 24 Σεπτεμβρίου 2024 - 19:54
Τετ, 18 Σεπτεμβρίου 2024 - 18:32
Τετ, 18 Σεπτεμβρίου 2024 - 18:27
Τρι, 17 Σεπτεμβρίου 2024 - 20:01