In December 2022, Campo Pendare surpassed its former output record of ten thousand barrels per day. The entire Tecpetrol Colombia team is extremely proud. And you can see why!

The industry is well aware that it’s always tough at the beginning. Breaking through the inertia, putting your shoulder to the wheel and pushing it get it moving is a key moment and each one has its own particular characteristics. It was two years ago when this special moment happened at the Pendare field in Colombia. Suddenly there was a future, an outlook. The studies were encouraging. There was heaps of will and passion. Absolutely everything… had to be done.

“At that time we were producing four times less than we are now. Our objective was a tough one, since quadrupling field output is not an easy task. So we started out with great intensity: we ran a sustained drilling campaign added to an investment campaign to build the CPF (Central Processing Facility),” says Fabián Giaccaglia, Sr. Development Manager in Bogotá, by way of introduction. In other words, they had to build a complete plant before having any results to show for all their efforts.

“We had consolidated a long-term path of derisking, analyzing what and how much was in the subsoil. We made so many investments where we ended up empty-handed: those curve balls that nature throws you start to mount up, time was passing and there were as yet few results.”

An example of the unyielding optimism in the most uncertain and difficult moment in the life of a field. “We began work in October 2021. In less than a year and a half, where we lived through all the stages of uncertainty, joy and effort, the drilling campaign was able to triple the number of active wells, multiply oil production fourfold, and liquids production sevenfold. This was all hugely relevant in a field where there were comparatively few data, and the only predictable thing about it all was uncertainty, despite our obstinate optimism.”

Finally, in December 2022 we notched up the milestone of ten thousand barrels per day and in February this year, we made it to eleven thousand. It’s been a very long road to finding a field, to identifying the best way to develop it, and skirt all the crises and difficulties besetting our gamble on this as a long-term project,” Fabián recalls proudly. Next to him, Marco Aurelio Hernández, Operations Sr Manager, agrees that, “Reaching this milestone had two direct impacts: first, for the Tecpetrol Colombia team, it was such a strong emotional boost to reach the first objective toward which they’d been working so hard for so many years. And for Tecpetrol, this is the culmination of the consolidation of an operation that came up against one difficulty after another, due to its exploratory nature but which despite all that, was able to inaugurate the CPF, which enabled it to start commercial development.”

A goal that goes beyond the specific business, as Juan Amoroso, Commercial & Planning Manager, explains. ”This shows that as a team, Tecpetrol Colombia has the execution capabilities to amply fulfill the plans it draws up. Having reached these excellent targets, we can continue thinking about ways of growing as an Exploration & Production project to make our task more efficient.”

“We reached an output level that an entire team had spent years sweating over, calculating, promising, and recalculating. Today, our fears and anxieties are giving way to concrete expectations. But we’re still under a lot of pressure: today the challenge has been redefined as how to maintain reserve production and growth, which means that we are trying to capitalize on everything we’ve learned,” says Fabián. And he concludes with, "At the Pendare field, we have a vision of a 2040 horizon and beyond... but with complete certainty, we can look back and say that these last three years have been the ones that have brought the most changes and consolidated Tecpetrol’s project and presence in Colombia."