Argentina turns to Bolivia for gas

With Argentine gas production falling and the country increasingly reliant on spot LNG cargoes the government has turned to Bolivia to secure its long-term gas-supply requirements, reports Robert Olson

ARGENTINA has finally signed up for a significant increase in natural-gas imports from Bolivia, ending years of short-term solutions to its gas-supply deficit. The agreement, which will result in a five-fold expansion of Bolivian gas shipments to Argentina by 2017, will make Argentina as big a customer for Bolivia as Brazil is. Bolivia's potential to be a significant natural-gas producer has long been thwarted by its difficult geography and politics. An obvious way to turn the impoverished country's gas reserves into cash for development has been liquefaction, but hostility to exporting gas through neighbouring Chile, as a result of a century-old grievance over coastal land seized in a 19th