The president of the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH), Orlando Velandia, at the ACP Sustainability Forum, He explained the tasks that the entity is leading to be able to unblock natural gas projects in the Colombian offshore.
“It is a bit of redeeming time, which we are also doing now from the CREG: because we see that, in the last almost six years, at the time the deposits were discovered -for example, in 2017 offshore-, many of the regulatory issues were not carried out“Velandia indicated.
And, he added, “today the work tables that we have permanently with Ecopetrol, Shell, Anadarko, Petrobras, we are redeeming the time, despite the fact that the tasks were not done in the last six years, since the deposits were discovered to look at the activities from a regulatory point of view.
Orlando Velandia recalled that, in terms of gas, The same criteria are not used for the quantification of reserves.
“This depends a lot on the contracts that have been signed to make the quantification. We all have the expectation of the important resources that we have discovered in the Caribbean Sea, but there are some regulatory issues in which, unfortunately, no progress was being made,” indicated the expert.
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Velandia mentioned that “it is no longer time to simply look back,” What is needed is to advance in working groups with the companies that have made the discoveries and that are interested in quickly developing them..
This has to do, according to the ANH spokesperson, with making these possible contracts viable so that they can be signed – what they call virtual contracts – and thus the production and incorporation of reserves of this energy can be unlocked.
“To get out of the situation of ‘I do not declare the commercialization of those fields, I do not incorporate them because I do not have the contracts. And I don’t have the contracts because I don’t have the regulatory measures that allow it.’ Nobody signs a contract without rules of the game“said the president of the Agency.
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For that reason, The ANH seeks mechanisms to advance in unraveling the situation so that production companies can have a clear outlook that will lead to the materialization of contracts.. “And there we can now quantify resources that we take to reserves.”
Meanwhile, the president of the ANH explained the need to have regulatory measures that must be taken in matters of transportation. “How are we going to do? Because the gas is there, but how do we bring it to the continent? This implies measures that we are working on with Ecopetrol and Cenit to unravel these issues.”
It is expected that, in the coming days, provisions are in place to resolve regulatory gaps.
