Colombia oil find risks new row

news.bbc.co.uk Last Updated:  Tuesday, 4 March, 2003, 23:24 GMT

A prospective new oil find in Colombia could reignite a battle over land that indigenous campaigners thought they had won.

The president of Colombia's state-owned oil company, Ecopetrol, announced that exploratory drilling close to the country's north-eastern border with Venezuela has located reserves of approximately 200 million barrels of light crude oil.

The well was abandoned in May 2002 by a US oil company Occidental Petroleum, after almost a decade of legal wrangling and international campaigning to halt the drilling.

The area is the ancestral territory of 5,000 U'wa Indians. They believe oil is the blood of the earth and have previously threatened mass suicide if drilling went ahead.

After Occidental left, Ecopetrol took over exploration.

'High quality'

Colombia produces about 590,000 barrels of oil a day.

But last year Isaac Yanovich, Ecopetrol's president, warned last year that reserves would begin to run out within five years.

But on Monday he said he was hopeful.

US special force have been deployed in the oil rich area

"There's a good chance that this is of very high quality," he told reporters, according to news agency Associated Press.

And while Colombia stood to take 85% of any profits realised through Occidental exploration, "Gibraltar I is a 100% Ecopetrol project, which means the reserves and the production belong exclusively to the nation," he said.

But there remain manifold problems in extracting oil from the region.

In addition to the U'wa Indians' objections to drilling, left-wing guerrillas often bomb oil pipelines and installations as part of their 38-year war against the state.

The US Government recently agreed to provide $98m - including US special forces - to help protect a lucrative oil pipeline in Colombia which has been attacked 200 times in the last two years alone.