Bogota, June 22 (IANS/EFE) Colombia will auction off its 230 oil exploration blocs including those situated in the Pacific region and along the maritime border with Nicaragua.
‘During the Ronda Colombia 2010 beginning Tuesday in the Caribbean city of Cartagena, the oil fields will also be offered in the Amazon jungle,’ director of the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH), Armando Zamora told Bogota’s El Tiempo daily.
With 80 companies qualified for bidding, Zamora said, the government is expecting to earn between $250 million and $500 million through the auction.
The move will help the country to achieve the target of producing 1 million barrels of oil per day by 2015, he said.
Mines and Energy Minister Hernan Martinez had said earlier this month that there were a ‘couple of (interesting) fields’ along the maritime border with Nicaragua, where seismic work has already been conducted and it would appear that they have some important structures’.
Nicaragua and Colombia have been locked in a border dispute since 2001, when the former declared a 1928 treaty setting the boundary in the Caribbean Sea as invalid and took the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague.
