Senate President Luis Fernando Velasco has again called on the government to lower prices and accept a court ruling from December 2015 which deemed a fuel price stabilization tax from the last tax reform was not properly vetted. He says it would lower the fuel prices by CoP$1000 (US$0.30).
I have been back from holidays for less than two weeks; we resumed normal HCC publishing on the 11th of January.
The December MinMinas ‘accentuate the positive’ production press release only mentioned the slight month-over-month increase in December gas production, failing to mention that 2015 finished 5.6% below 2014. Or that, as the graph shows, the trend is decidedly negative.
President Juan Manuel Santos paid a visit to the Caribbean coast and addressed energy costs and supply for the region, which have been creating a stir in national politics. To better address the opportunities and needs, Santos has prepared a ‘road map’ which will lead the way to change.
A proposed Meta Refinery has received a new boost as a Colombian-Dominican-Korean Consortium has made a proposal to build the plant with technology specially designed for heavy crude and at a significantly lower price than a previous proposal.
Press reports say that a formal bilateral cease fire is getting very close, while the United Nations is contemplating a role as an outside observer of the cease fire and laying down of arms. The request is the fruit of an agreement on the mechanism to be used that was signed this week.
Eye on EcopetrolEither Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) CEO Juan Carlos Echeverry is ‘sandbagging’ his board or the NOC is preparing for some steep production declines in 2016. Otherwise, our calculations make it hard to explain a 755 mboed production target.
Gran Tierra Energy (TSX:GTE) has announced its 2016 investment plan which it says will give it flexibility in allocating capital to projects and better weather the volatility in oil prices. The firm says that it wants to both grow and expand on its assets in Colombia.
Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC), through its laboratories with the Colombian Petroleum Institute (ICP) is launching a study of Bogotá’s air quality, while the Senate has voted to protect wetlands and high mountain tundra. These and other environmental stories in our periodic summary.
USO affiliated workers at the Barrancabermeja have put up the greatest resistance to Ecopetrol’s (NYSE:EC) cost cutting measures, with a continued run of protests and blockades affecting the area since mid-December. An unstructured dialogue continues for now.
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