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 ECUADOR
South America
The main producing area in Ecuador is the Napo basin
in the Oriente region, with its first discovery, Lagio Agrio, in 1967.
The basin lies to the east of the
Andes in the Putumayo-Napo-Maranon trend stretching from Colombia
through to Peru.
The state firm Petroecuador currently produces the bulk
of the country’s output. After leaving OPEC in 1992 Ecuador rejoined the
organisation in early 2007. In the past output was constrained by lack of export
capacity. From 1972 to the end of 1993 the country had just one
state-run pipeline (Trans-Ecuadorian, SOTE) with space to transport up
to around 400,000 Bbls per day.
 Most of Ecuador’s production comes from the Oriente but
near the Peruvian border on the coast, in the neighbourhood of the Santa
Elena Peninsula, the Progreso basin has produced from small oilfields
since 1917, the largest of which is Ancon.
An offshore gas field (Amistad) was discovered in shallow
waters of the Guayaquil basin to the south in 1970. It came onstream
in 2002 but there is no offshore oil potential apart from extensions of
onshore fields.
The full to capacity SOTE line transports 325,000 to
390,000 Bbls per day from the Napo basin. Increases in the capacity of
this line are needed to increase production rates allowing export of shut-in
oil, however many of the original fields are now in decline. A new pipeline (the OCP line) started up in December 2003 to
exploit light and heavy oil from other discoveries in the southwest of the Napo Basin.
Heavy oil discoveries in the Amazon basin to the south will also be
developed in the longer term.
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