By Peter Murphy
BOGOTA, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Colombia will for the first timeauction areas potentially containing non-conventional or shalecrude in its 2014 oil round in July that it is launching onWednesday as it seeks to sustain a wave of foreign investmentinto the sector.
Latin America's No. 4 oil producer aims to raise around $2.6billion by selling more than 22 million hectares for explorationand production at the July 23 auction, the National HydrocarbonsAgency (ANH), which is overseeing the auction, has said.
Crude output rose 6.6 percent to just over 1 million barrelsper day in 2013, most of which was extracted by state-ownedEcopetrol. Canadian-listed Pacific Rubiales isthe largest of a number of private sector players, among whichare Chevron, Shell and Exxon Mobil.
Attracting more investment is critical as Colombia'sreserves had dipped to 2.38 billion barrels by the end of 2012,roughly equivalent to six years' output at current productionlevels, according to ANH data. Neighboring Venezuela's reservesare now estimated to be larger than those of Saudi Arabia.
The ANH will hold an international road show taking inLondon, Houston and Jakarta to tout improved security andpromising geological potential, which recently have helped lurerecord foreign investment in a country once shunned at theheight of a still-ongoing war with its Marxist guerrillas.
Security in Colombia has improved vastly after a militaryoffensive lasting more than a decade and heavily backed by theUnited States, but the FARC and ELN guerrillas perpetratedregular bomb attacks on oil pipelines last year, disruptingtransport.
Two potentially large finds late last year gave weight toColombia's belief that there are large recoverable reserves inthe central province of Meta, an area that will receive a shareof Ecopetrol's $75 billion investment through 2020. The companyaims to raise its production 30 percent by then.
Ecopetrol announced in December that an area it owns jointlywith Canada's Talismann Energy could contain around 1.3billion barrels of crude, about a 10th of which was likely to berecoverable.
In the same month, Ecopetrol declared viable a separatearea, Cano Sur Este, which it said has proven reserves of 22.4million barrels. The 2014 round will also put up for auctionareas of methane gas is associated with coal, usually burned forpower generation.
