Caño Limón – Coveñas pipeline
| Caño Limón – Coveñas pipeline | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Location | |
| Country | Colombia |
| Province | Arauca Department, Norte de Santander Department, Sucre Department |
| From | Caño Limón oilfield |
| To | Coveñas |
| General information | |
| Type | crude oil |
| Owner | Ecopetrol, Occidental Petroleum |
| Commissioned | 1986 |
| Technical information | |
| Length | 780 km (480 mi) |
| Maximum discharge | 0.225 million barrels per day (~1.12×107 t/a) |
The Caño Limón – Coveñas pipeline is a crude oil pipeline in Colombia from the Caño Limón oilfield in the municipalities of Arauca and Arauquita in Arauca Department on the border of Venezuela to Coveñas on Colombia's Caribbean coastline. It is jointly owned by the state oil firm Ecopetrol, and U.S. company Occidental Petroleum. The pipeline is 780 kilometres (480 mi) long.
From the point of view of officials at Ecopetrol, developing petroleum reserves in Arauca seemed a great opportunity, especially with multinational petroleum companies willing to accept all or most of the apparent financial risks. Oil for export to the United States of America from South America was strategically important to the US in 1985-86 because of a general interest in decreasing dependency upon middle-eastern oil. Anti-Communist efforts by the US under President Ronald Reagan in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Grenada suggest that it was important to the US to decrease Communist influences in Central and South America. The Colombian Government was, at that time, fighting a civil war on multiple fronts with Communist Guerrilla groups. From a private enterprise point of view, middle eastern crises propping up the price of oil made petroleum development in Colombia an attractive opportunity.
In that context, the discovery of significant oil reserves in Arauca, Colombia must have seemed a great opportunity to Occidental Petroleum as they negotiated contracts for exploration, oil field development, oil pipeline construction, and a oil tanker port at Coveñas, Colombia. Occidental Petroleum, Oxy, made many efforts to maintain a positive and helpful corporate image. The 1985 installation of the oil fields at Caño Limón flooded the local economy with currency, causing dramatic inflation reported by at least one economic study. Rumors of one particular Oxy executive opening a suitcase full of cash in a hotel lobby within view of many people suggest that wealthy foreign professionals recklessly publicized how much money they had.
The influx of workers placed significant pressure on local infrastructure, with compromised sanitation and other externality impacts not fully addressed by the petroleum project developers. This all took place in remote, under-developed towns and rural areas inhabited to a significant extent by families who identified with the Communist Party and had fled the urban areas of Colombia to escape La Violencia of the 1940's and 1950's. Many factors contributed to anti-government, xenophobic, anti-extraction-for-export, pro-Communist, and anti-US sentiments.
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