Bolivia to open protected areas for exploration

OREANDA-NEWS. July 27, 2015. The Bolivian government is cutting environmental red tape and opening up protected areas for oil and natural gas exploration.

At an oil and gas conference in Santa Cruz this week, energy minister Luis Alberto Sanchez said a new decree has streamlined environmental permitting and community consultations.

A second decree has shifted requisite local compensation for oil projects from a direct economic outlay to concrete community projects, as a percentage of the value of the investment.

A third decree opens up seven of 22 protected areas of the country for oil exploration. Each area averages 559,051 hectares (1.3mn acres), and only 0.04pc of the combined area will be affected by seismic activity and initial exploration drilling, the minister said.

"We should explore these areas. We have all the provisions to protect mother earth. There won?t be significant environmental damage," he told delegates at the congress.

Foreign oil companies with a presence in Bolivia include Total, Brazilian state-controlled Petrobas and Spain?s Repsol, among others. There was no immediate reaction to the government?s initiatives.

Bolivia produces around 60mn m?/d of gas, of which around 30mn m?/d is exported by pipeline to Brazil and around 17mn m?/d to Argentina. The government is targeting peak production of 87mn m?/d in 2022. Production has stagnated in recent years.

YPFB chief executive Guilermo Acha said Bolivia will boost gas reserves to 11.5 trillion cf in 2021, compared with 10.45 tcf in the previous certification of 2013. The 2025 goal is 18 tcf, including 7.6 tcf of new reserves and 9.9 tcf of replacement reserves.

President Evo Morales, at a closing ceremony, said Bolivia will focus on building thermoelectric plants using gas to export electricity to neighboring countries like Brazil.

Bolivia currently has 1,900MW of installed capacity, with a target of 13,382MW in 2025, mostly from new hydroelectric plants.