Colombia's State Oil Company Proudly Trumpets Tiny Find - 15 MB (?!?)

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BOGOTA, Colombia - (KRT) - With the nation's proven oil reserves continuing to fall, investment and exploration sagging and sabotage from a 40-year old civil war enduring, the Colombian government and its oil company, Ecopetrol, have been desperate to ballyhoo any find, small though it may be. "Ecopetrol bet and won," the Ministry of Mines and Energy loudly proclaimed this week, after Ecopetrol said it had found 15 million barrels of crude and a small deposit of natural gas at a northwest oil field known as Gibraltar.

But what exactly had it won? Ecopetrol has spent $30 million exploring Gibraltar and just last year declared that the field held 200 million barrels. Now it's promising that this is only the beginning. Skeptics abound.

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Nor has Gibraltar been the only disappointment. Last year, British Petroleum said it would have to reassess possible reserves at the Niscota field, just south of Gibraltar. Original projections for Niscota had hovered near 900 million barrels. No one dares project anything any more.

For years, Colombia has been portrayed as the region's great untapped potential. With 530,000 barrels per day of production, it is Latin America's fifth-largest oil producer. The government estimates that there are 40 billion barrels of reserves, of which the country has used just 7.5 billion. But since peaking at 845,000 barrels per day in 1999, Colombia's wells have begun to dry up. Current proven reserves are near 1.5 billion barrels and declining rapidly. The government says that, without more discoveries, Colombia will become a net importer of crude before the end of the decade. When that time comes, Gilbraltar, once thought to contain as much as 1.4 billion barrels of oil, may be the symbol of everything that went wrong. Its demise came from a combination of factors, among them bad luck, war and geology."

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http://www.kansas.com/mld/kansas/news/world/9501855.htm