Ecopetrol, Colombia’s largest oil company, submitted the highest bids on Wednesday in the U.S. to acquire 19 oil fields in the Gulf of Mexico.
Of the 19 winning bids, which were submitted by Ecopetrol’s U.S. subsidiary, four of them are for complete control of fields, while the remaining 15 are joint ventures with other companies.
Ecopetrol’s bids will be evaluated for ratification by the Mineral Management Service (MMS), the U.S. government agency that manages exploration in the Gulf of Mexico region, in 60 to 90 days.
The 19 bids from Ecopetrol amount to a total of $15 million.
The MMS states that, “77 companies submitted 642 bids on 468 tracts comprising over 2.4 million acres offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. The sum of all bids received totaled $1,300,075,693.”
According to a statement from Ecopetrol, the bids “are in line with the company’s internationalization process, being [that] the Gulf of Mexico (U.S.) [is] one of its focus areas. The internationalization process makes part of the strategy reach a production of one million barrels of oil equivalent per day in 2015.”
According to their statement, “Ecopetrol is Colombia’s largest integrated oil company, is among the top 40 oil companies in the world and the four largest oil companies in Latin America. Besides Colombia, where it accounts for 60% of total production, the Company is involved in exploration and production activities in Brazil, Peru and the United States (Gulf of Mexico). Ecopetrol has the principal refinery in Colombia, most of the network of oil and multiple purpose pipelines in the country, and it is considerably increasing its participation in biofuels.”
