Bogota – U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum Corp (NYSE:OXY – news) will begin drilling a long-delayed test well this year in northeast Colombia’s Samore block, a disputed area claimed as tribal lands by U’wa Indians, a company official said Thursday.
The $40 million, 15,000-foot (4,570-meter) Gibraltar-1 test well had been scheduled to be sunk in the first half of the year but was repeatedly delayed by legal action from U’wa leaders, leftist rebel attacks on engineering equipment and inclement weather.
“The rig is going in, and the idea is to begin drilling Gibraltar, the first exploratory well in a basically unexplored area, before the end of the year,” the official told Reuters.
He spoke on condition of anonymity because of security concerns in this Andean nation, which is racked by an escalating guerrilla war that has taken 35,000 lives in the last decade.
A September target date to start drilling in the Samore block, touted to hold some 2 billion barrels of crude reserves, was delayed as preparations continued. It will take about seven months to drill Gibraltar-1, the official said.
If test drilling is successful the field could ensure supplies of oil, Colombia’s top export earner, well into the next decade.
But the land dispute has prevented Los Angeles-based Occidental from drilling since 1992, when it won exploration rights in the 495,000-acre (200,000-hectare) block.
The company has come under fire from environmental and indigenous rights organisations over its plans to drill just outside the legal limits of the U’wa reservation.
U’wa Indians, claiming that the land is part of their ancestral heritage and that pumping oil would drain the earth’s lifeblood, in the past have threatened to commit mass suicide by walking off a cliff if the project proceeded.
Their protests drew support from international organisations, and the controversy extended to Vice President Al Gore, who owns family shares in Occidental.
In a failed bid to settle the dispute, last year the government tripled the size of the reservation where some 5,000 U’wa Indians live.
Occidental operates the Cano Limon pipeline, one of the country’s top export pipelines, which has been targeted in a sustained offensive by Marxist rebels this year with 78 bombings.
