The USO sees several convenient political battles where it can gain ground and is aggressively approaching them: promises from the government on the Barrancabermeja Refinery modernization, worker layoffs due to price fall and increases in natural gas prices to the end user on the Caribbean coast.
The fall in the price of oil has moved the government to sound the alarms and start inspecting oil companies and contractors to verify their liquidity and ability to pay workers, suppliers and meet other obligations
The Minister of Environment Gabriel Vallejo says that he wants to avoid creating green taxes, but instead install or enforce charges for actions that have an environmental impact.
The first round of talks in 2015 started on Monday, kicking off what President Juan Manuel Santos describes as “the most difficult stage” of the talks, as the issue of how to structure a post-conflict transition becomes the focus.
On Tuesday we published our index graph of retail fuel prices through February and the average of WTI and Brent in pesos as a proxy for the price of a barrel of oil. We noted that retail prices were 20 to 30% above where they were in January 2010 even though crude prices were 15% below.
A study conducted by the Colombian Petroleum Association and Burson Marsteller with 37 oil companies in Colombia found that more than half of them want to move investment to countries with lower tax rates like the USA, Brazil, Peru or Mexico.
Gas distributor Gases de Occidente says that it is rolling out an expansion plan that includes small loans to its end customers and a potential natural gas pipeline to Buenaventura.
The president of the Colombian Senate Jose Name says that natural gas shipments to Venezuela should be cut off and the gas should instead be used to supply the Caribbean coast at a lower cost.
The Oil Council’s Latin American Assembly was held again in Bogotá this year. The conference brings investors, E&P and services companies and top legal firms to talk about investment drivers in the region. So called ‘Chatham House’ rules prevent us from publishing quotes with attribution but here is what we got from the two days.
The falling price of oil might be what hurled the oil industry into a crisis that looks to bring layoffs in the sector, but there are a number of issues that have been in the works for some time, along with the recent tax reform, that have also weakened the sector, according to the heads of two oil industry associations.
2025, Hydrocarbons Colombia, All Rights Reserved.
