Colombia’s state-owned Ecopetrol SA recently announced an oil and gas discovery in Putumayo province that will offset the 60% decline in the company’s net profit in the second quarter of 2023.

The exploratory well, called Alqamari-2, which was drilled to a depth of 9,287 feet recorded a daily flow of 1,800 barrels of oil along with 825,000 cf/d of associated gas.

Alqamari-2 is saturated in an area directly controlled by Ecopetrol according to the agreement signed with the National Hydrocarbons Agency (NHA) that gives Colombia all rights and duties for Western Area Exploration.

Located in an area close to fields in production, the Alqamari-2 well would quickly turn to a significant reserve contributing to oil and gas production in Colombia which struggles for increasing hydrocarbon findings to reduce crude oil imports in less than six years.

Suffering difficult geologic conditions, Colombia found difficulty to explore for oil and gas for long. Thus, after a century of oil exploration in Colombia, only four giant fields with reserves of more than 900 million barrels of oil have been found till 2021. Nevertheless, Colombia ranks among the twenty most attractive countries in the world for exploration.

However, NHA has received resource studies that estimate total reserves of 2-10 bn barrels of conventional hydrocarbons and unconventional hydrocarbons could reach up to 20 bn barrels and preliminary conventional natural gas reserves could yield up to 11.4 TCF of probable and potential reserves in the Colombian onshore and offshore basins, including Tayrona, Sinu, Tumaco, and Choco.