Page 12 - LatAmOil Week 47 2020

LatAmOil COLOMBIA LatAmOil

CNE and Parex each placed two bids in an ini- Netherlands) signed deals to operate new blocks
tial auction held in the Latin American country in Colombia in 2019.
at the end of last month. The former company The Colombian government has been try-
made offers for Blocks VIM 44 and VMM 47, ing to boost its slow-moving oil sector in recent
while Parex Resources bid for Blocks LLA 134 years, with modified contractual terms and less
and VIM 43. bureaucracy, following a slump in exploration
The bids are worth an estimated total of due to the oil price crash. However, it has been
$40mn, ANH said. “We are very pleased to have another challenging year for the sector, owing to
received offers in 2020,” said Armando Zamora, weak crude prices and the fall in global energy
the president of the agency. demand that has followed the coronavirus
ANH had previously qualified a total of 16 (COVID-19) pandemic. ™
companies – including Occidental Petroleum
(US), Frontera (US) and GeoPark (Canada) –
to bid in the auction, which offered acreage in
seven onshore and two offshore basins. It has not
yet received offers for all of the assets.
Parex (Canada) and CNE Oil and Gas
(Colombia) were among the companies to be
awarded contracts for 15 blocks in an auction
held last December, the second oil and gas auc-
tion to take place in Colombia in 2019. That con-
test drew 17 bids from 10 companies, or less than
half the number of firms that had pre-qualified
for bidding. Nonetheless, the 15 blocks are antic-
ipated to bring in at least $500mn in investment.
Foreign majors ExxonMobil (US), Rep-
sol (Spain) and Royal Dutch Shell (UK/ CNE made offers for VMM 47 and VIM 44 (Image: ANH)

GUYANA
Elliott Management reportedly acquires

indirect stake in Kaieteur project

ELLIOTT Management, a hedge fund run by resource development.
activist investor Paul Singer, has acquired an Kaieteur lies in a deepwater section of Guy-
indirect stake in the Kaieteur block offshore ana’s offshore zone to the north of Stabroek, the
Guyana. block that contains the country’s only producing
Two sources familiar with the matter told oilfield, Liza-1.
Reuters earlier this week that Elliott Manage-
ment had pumped at least $30mn into Cataleya
Energy, a Canadian-registered firm that owns a
25% stake in Kaieteur. They did not comment
on the fund’s reasons for venturing into Guy-
ana, but the news agency noted that the South
American state has drawn considerable interest
since it began commercial crude oil production
in December 2019.
When contacted by Reuters, both Elliott
Management and Cataleya declined to com-
ment on the matter. Mike Cawood, Cataleya’s
CEO, acknowledged that his company’s share-
holders included investors from Canada, several
Caribbean states, Guyana, Israel and the US, but
did not elaborate. Cataleya intends to disclose
further details before the end of the year, he said,
so that Guyana’s government can include them
in its next report to the Extractive Industries
Transparency Institute (EITI), a global organi-
sation that promotes transparency in subsurface Both Kaieteur and Canje are adjacent to Stabroek(Image: ExxonMobil)

P12 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 47 26•November•2020