Ecuador eyes Amazonian growth, foreign investment

摘要

Ecuador is banking on the development of two oil fields in an environmentally sensitive area of the Amazon rainforest to help boost its production over the next few years. But the country needs to attract more exploration investment if it is to sustain output growth. The forced renegotiation of upstream contracts in 2010 led Brazil’s state-controlled Petrobras to leave Ecuador. The foreign oil firms that stayed have increasingly focused their investment on producing assets rather than exploration. Crude output has stagnated at around 500,000 b/d over the last few years. And the country needs to boost upstream spending significantly to meet its goal of increasing production to 530,000 b/d this year and 650,000 b/d by 2020. It has been raising short-term capital through oil-backed loans from China. But foreign investment in Ecuador’s oil sector fell to $330mn last year from $421mn in 2011.