Spanish oil company Repsol YPF will invest 1.5 million dollars over the next five years to boost natural gas production in Bolivia, the company announced Thursday.
- Source: Wikipedia
Production would be boosted on the Margarita and Huacaya fields in the south of Bolivia from two million cubic meters of gas a day to eight million cubic meters daily by 2012 and 14 million cubic meters a day by 2013, Repsol president Antonio Brufau said at a function to announce the investment.
The increased production levels would be used to boost exports to Argentina and to supply Bolivia’s domestic market, officials said.
The investment will give Bolivia “additional gas volume that will allow the country to meet commitments to the internal market and for export, mainly to the market in Argentina,” said Carlos Villegas, head of Bolivia’s state-run oil company Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales Bolivianos (YPFB).
Months after President Evo Morales nationalized Bolivia’s gas industry in 2006, La Paz signed a deal with Buenos Aires, aimed at generating at least 17 billion dollars in Bolivian gas exports over a decade.
Under the accord, Argentina’s state-owned energy company ENARSA would explore for and exploit gas, oil and other hydrocarbons in Bolivia, which has the second-largest gas reserves in South America after Venezuela.
The two countries also agreed under the deal to build a pipeline to carry gas from Bolivia to northeastern Argentina.
Bolivia was to have stepped up gas exports to Argentina to reach seven million cubic meters daily in 2008, rising to 14 million cubic meters when the pipeline came onstream in 2011.
But the project has met with delays and other setbacks, and Bolivia currently pumps between two and five million cubic meters daily to Argentina.
