RELATED ARTICLESJuly 2010 - Qatar: Change at the top for Qatargas, as LNG capacity continues to growJune 2010 - Indonesia: Buyers may pull out of Donggi-Senoro LNGMay 2010 - Venezuela's urgent need to exploit its gas resources seems to be outweighing President Hugo Chávez's dislike of Western firms, writes Ian LewisMay 2010 - In the space of three years, the LNG sector has witnessed dramatic changes, not least the recession and the rise of unconventional gas, writes John Meagher*
Significant Colombian LNG exports on the horizon, says ANH's Zamora
By Tom Nicholls Colombia could soon be a large gas exporter, says Armando Zamora, head of upstream regulator Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos (ANH). As several big oil companies gear up to drill wells in gas-prone deep-water areas off Colombia's Caribbean coast, ANH believes there may be potential for launching more than one LNG export terminal. "If exploration results in the Caribbean are what we are expecting, we may have more than one LNG project in the near future," Zamora told WGC News. The exploration will start in earnest next year, with five wells expected in 2010. Companies with acreage in the area include BP, Petrobras, state-controlled Ecopetrol, ExxonMobil, Hess, India's ONGC and BHP Billiton. The Colombian energy sector has proved resilient to the recession, said Zamora, with investment expected to end 2009 roughly level with 2008's figure. And, so far in 2009, it has signed up around 60 exploration contracts – putting it on a par with 2008 with three months of the year remaining. ANH also believes Colombia has "several trillion" cubic feet (cf) of reserves in shale-gas deposits north of the capital, Bogota, as well as large volumes of coal-bed methane. And it hopes to stimulate further gas exploration with a bidding round that it will launch in December – signing up companies by the second half of next year. Colombian gas production amounts to 1bn cf/d, with 0.7bn cf/d consumed locally and the remainder exported to Venezuela. The country's oil sector is also on a rapid growth path. Crude production has reached 0.67m barrels a day (b/d), up from 125,000 b/d in 2005. By the end of the year, the figure is expected to hit 0.7m b/d and ANH says the country is on track to reach 1m b/d by 2015.
|
