The Casanare Departmental government and local authorities held a roundtable discussion on plans to establish environmental protections in the wetlands near the La Cristalina Lagoon and Paz de Ariporo, parts of which include the Llanos 62 production block.
The USO claims that Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) has been misleading the value and potential of its assets so it can justify privatizing them, pointing out that multinationals have taken over fields with poor production and managed to improve them.
This is the second and final part of an article we published last week with the same title (1). Peace certainly looks closer now than it has for decades. That does not diminish the challenge as this article from Intelligence Petrolera’s Carlos Goedder points out.
At the ACP conference in mid-October, Ecopetrol President Juan Carlos Echeverry said peace was the most important success factor for the oil and gas industry.
President Juan Manuel Santos was on hand to receive the first shipment of crude destined for the modernized Cartagena Refinery (Reficar), with full capacity expected for the first half of next year.
A bit of spin is to be expected when government officials address strategic projects, but Minister of Finance Mauricio Cárdenas took it to a surprising level and asserted that the Cartagena Refinery really did not have overruns, rather its high cost was the fault of Glencore’s poor estimations in 2006.
The Farc claimed that despite a preliminary agreement, its unilateral cease fire and a halt of bombings from the military, the army’s constant operations against it have moved it to suspend its political and cultural courses.
An agreement to search for those missing due to the conflict and a wide statement of support (with conditions) from the business community, plus more optimism from the general public in a recent poll made this last week a positive one for the government’s peace efforts. But doubts on transitional justice remain.
The Minister of Mines and Energy Tomás González met with regional leaders from the Nariño Department and the National Direction of Hydrocarbons and said that fuel prices in regions should remain stable through the end of November at least, and reassured there would be supply.
While 2015 has been marked by the fall in oil prices, a report from BanColombia predicts that the full brunt of the fall will be felt in 2016, as the government’s austerity programs start to hit the overall economy.
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