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.

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