Over the weekend, rescuers in Colombia said that they had discovered
the bodies of six miners who were killed when an illegal underground goldmine
collapsed and was flooded with water. Nine other miners believed
to still be trapped in the mine are likely dead. The mine is located in the
town of Riosucio in an indigenous reservation, and collapsed when a power
outage shut down the mine’s pumps. According to the director of the Colombian
National Mining Agency, though the mine was in the process of getting its
papers in order, its underground shafts were constructed illegally.
For a change, Colombia’s oil-related news wasn’t all doom
and gloom. The Colombian Ministry of Mines and Energy announced
at the end of last week that the country had achieved a seventh consecutive
month with a daily oil production average above 1 million barrels per day.
April’s average came in at 1,025,000 bpd, an increase of 9.6% over the same
month one year earlier.
The Colombian government’s goal has been to keep production
as high as possible in order to compensate for lower oil prices. Ecopetrol’s
oil production results were even better
than the rest of the country’s oil industry, as the Colombian state-owned oil
company’s production was up 12.6% year-to-date, to an average of 722,000 bpd
for the first quarter of 2015.
In other oil-related news, Colombian weekly Semana
published an article tracing the history of Pacific Rubiales, the oil junior
that in less than a decade became the second-largest oil company in Colombia.
This transformation was entirely thanks to the Rubiales oil field, which with
Pacific’s Venezuelan know-how increased its daily production almost tenfold.
Semana closed its article with the recent news of Pacific Rubiales’ sale to Mexican
investors, noting that the next few weeks will reveal whether or not Pacific
will maintain its investments in Colombia.
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