Colombia gas lines need work for Venezuela flows

The Antonio Ricaurte pipeline will require maintenance for Colombia to carry out a tentative plan to import natural gas from Venezuela, Bogota's ambassador in Caracas, Armando Benedetti, said on Wednesday.

"We need to fix the pipeline in our territory," Benedetti said on the sidelines of a binational business and trade conference in Caracas.

Venezuela and Colombia have discussed potential gas trade, but infrastructure challenges and Venezuela's declining production would complicate the plan.

"There's nothing wrong with the pipeline, physically, but apparently they [Colombia] have stopped sending gas," a Venezuelan analyst near the border with Colombia said.

A Venezuelan company called Prodata is "moving ahead with a project to export [Venezuelan] gas", its president Roberto Villalba has said. He declined to comment on if Prodata had received a license from the government of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro to send up to 25mn cf/d of gas to Colombia over the Antonio Ricaurte pipeline.

Yet Benedetti said that such a deal would only be through state-owned companies.

"I would like to make that very clear — the one transporting the gas will be a state company," the envoy stated.

The 500mn cf/d, 224-km Antonio Ricaurte pipeline is the most ambitious energy infrastructure work connecting Venezuela and Colombia and was inaugurated by Hugo Chavez and his Colombian peer Alvaro Uribe in 2008. So far, only Colombian gas has flowed into Venezuela. The promise made at the time, of reverting the flow in 2013 so that Venezuelan gas could travel to Colombia, has never been fulfilled. The Venezuelan side of the pipeline lacks compression, desiccant and separation plants.

By Carlos Camacho