Colombia’s Oil Industry Faces an Existential Crisis

Colombia has not seen any world-class 500 million barrel-plus oil discoveries since the early 1990s. The last was Occidental Petroleum’s 1983 discovery of the 1.1-billion-barrel Caño Limón oilfield. This is the strife-torn nation’s largest ever oil discovery, not only leading to hydrocarbon self-sufficiency but triggering a massive petroleum boom that became what is known as Colombia’s golden age of oil that lasted into the late 1990s. The Andean country’s last world-class discoveries were the 750-million-b ...