Courtesy of The Financial Times, a report on recent initiatives between Colombia and Venezuela to team up in the oil sector:

“Zero,” said Hugo Chávez firmly, when asked almost three years ago what the chances were of Colombia’s state oil company Ecopetrol having a hand in developing Venezuela’s oil-rich Orinoco Belt.

That was back when Alvaro Uribe was Colombia’s president, and relations with Venezuela were at rock bottom. What a lot has changed since Juan Manuel Santos replaced him.

On Wednesday, Ecopetrol agreed with its Venezuelan counterpart, PDVSA, to form a joint venture to recover four mature oil fields in the west of the country near the Colombian border, two of them in Lake Maracaibo where Venezuela’s first wells were drilled a century ago.

The hope is to boost current production from 40,000 barrels per day to about 100,000 bpd, and would help to stem the declining production in the region.

Ok, it’s not the Orinoco, a vast reserve of extra-heavy oil which is largely undeveloped and which represents the bright future of Venezuela’s oil industry. But it’s a step in the right direction, and is the latest sign of a continually improving relationship between the neighbouring countries whose governments were at each other’s throats just a couple of years ago.

Furthermore, Ecopetrol and PDVSA are also discussing a proposal to build an $8bn pipeline to send Venezuela’s oil to Colombia’s Pacific coast, and beyond – especially to China, which is understandably interested in financing the project.

Perhaps with the involvement of Colombia and China, which in particular has a strong incentive to make the project happen, it won’t go the way of so many of Chávez’s other grand plans, which all too often are forgotten about no sooner than the next one comes along.