PANA­MA CITY-Some 900 mil­lion bar­rels of crude oil have been de­tect­ed at two basins in east­ern Pana­ma, rep­re­sent­ing a po­ten­tial con­tri­bu­tion to the coun­try's cof­fers of US$15 bil­lion over 20 years, the Na­tion­al En­er­gy Sec­re­tari­at said. A ge­o­log­i­cal study con­duct­ed by Venezue­lan firm OTS de­tect­ed the de­posits in the Gara­chine-Sam­bu and Bayano-Chu­cu­naque-Atra­to basins of Darien province, which bor­ders Colom­bia, En­er­gy Sec­re­tary Juan Manuel Ur­rio­la said yes­ter­day in a state­ment. The qual­i­ty of the oil de­posits has not yet been de­ter­mined but Ur­rio­la es­ti­mat­ed their "com­mer­cial po­ten­tial" at some US$15 bil­lion in tax­es and roy­al­ties based on the con­sul­tant's es­ti­mate of a per-bar­rel price of US$100 over 20 years.

The Venezue­lan firm rec­om­mend­ed that in the bid­ding process the ex­plorato­ry ar­eas be di­vid­ed in­to four ge­o­graph­i­cal blocks per basin, Ur­rio­la said. OTS will sub­mit a prospec­tus con­tain­ing "all the in­for­ma­tion al­ready clas­si­fied and digi­tised through the use of spe­cialised soft­ware and which will en­able the bid­ding process to be­gin" on an un­spec­i­fied date, the state­ment said. Ur­rio­la an­nounced on Ju­ly 5 the dis­cov­ery of the oil de­posits, say­ing that be­fore the end of 2011 a bid process for ex­plo­ration rights and for de­ter­min­ing the de­posits' qual­i­ty and vol­ume would be launched. In the state­ment pub­lished yes­ter­day, the En­er­gy Sec­re­tari­at said Pres­i­dent Ri­car­do Mar­tinel­li is push­ing for oil ex­plo­ration be­cause of Pana­ma's need to have its own en­er­gy re­sources and lessen the coun­try's de­pen­dence on oil de­riv­a­tives, the high cost of which has caused lo­cal fu­el prices to soar.Mar­tinel­li said in April 2010 that oil de­posits had been de­tect­ed in Darien and that a study showed that oil seams lo­cat­ed in Colom­bia reach as far as Pana­ma. (Latin Amer­i­can Her­ald Tri­bune)