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José Francisisco Arata, president of Pacific Rubiales
ration and production company in Colombia. The Toronto-listed
group was founded in 2008 after the merger of Pacific Stratus Energy
Corp. and Petro Rubiales Energy Corp. It operates Colombia’s
largest oil field and also has operations in Guatemala and Peru. The
company had the capacity to produce 251,000 barrels of oil equivalent
(BOE) per day in 2011.
“We have been leading the industry since we arrived in Colombia,
not only with our exploration success, but also in implementing
and ramping up the production of Colombia’s heavy oil,” says José
Fransisco Arata, president, Pacific Rubiales.
Over the past four years, the company has transformed Rubiales
Field, in the Eastern Llanos Basin, into the largest producing field
in Colombia, and one of the biggest onshore fields in all of Latin
America. Low levels of production began at Rubiales in the late
1980s, but increasing investment and the completion of a new
pipeline have allowed production rates to rise in recent years.
“We quickly realized that Rubiales Field was similar to many
fields that we have in Venezuela in the heavy Orinoco Belt. We applied
techniques that have been successfully used in Venezuela for
many years, such as the use of horizontal wells, which has allowed
us to significantly increase recovery,” says Arata.
Production at Rubiales exceeded 170,000 barrels per day in
2011, up from only 12,000 barrels daily in June 2007. “Our target is
to become a 500,000-barrels-per-day operator within the next five
years and also to double our existing 2P reserves to 700 million,”
says Arata. “We have a significant investment plan in place to
achieve that.”
Pacific Rubiales plans to invest $1.6 billion in exploration over
the next five years, which includes drilling over 200 exploratory
wells and shooting over 10,000 kilometers of 2-D and over 4,000
kilometers of 3-D. “We already have blocks in very prospective
basins and we think that we can maintain that very successful track
record in exploration, of over 80% drill success,” says Arata.
“The management team at Pacific Rubiales is a group of aggressive
entrepreneurs with extreme knowledge of how to deal with
heavy crude oil, which we have a lot of in Colombia. When Pacific
Rubiales came here, they were able to capitalize on investors in a
market that was looking for that kind of expertise,” says Boris Cura,
vice president for South America at one of the country’s leading
drilling companies, Saxon Energy Services.
“I have worked all over the world with many different operators,
and what you have at Pacific Rubiales is a group of executives who
are open to new ideas and who listen to our input. When you have
a customer that listens to you and allows you to combine your ex-
June 2012 ▪ OilandGasInvestor.com C-9