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.
The Minister of Mines and Energy (MinMinas) Tomás González called for the industry to keep production above a million barrels a day, which he says will help avoid mass lay-offs in the oil sector.
The devaluation of the Colombian peso against the dollar has helped lessen the impact of falling oil prices on company balance sheets as their costs in Colombia drop, but for the government it could have a multi prong effect that will leave its revenues short and increase its debt.
The National Planning Department (DNP) has warned that projects that look for royalty funding will have to be prioritized considering the drop of oil prices and the consequences on royalty payments received by the government. This and other royalty related stories in our periodic wrap.
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