News and AnalysIs for

On the same day that the company announced buying 75% of Alvopetro S.A., a company with operations and tight oil opportunities in Brazil, Petrominerales made a wide ranging announcement of operations, finance and exploration plans for 2013.

Ecopetrol had its last board meeting of the year on Sunday December 16th which approved the capital expenditure (CAPEX) budget for 2013. The company will invest over US$9.5B or about the equivalent of a quarter’s worth of revenue across all its varied businesses. The ‘mother ship’ will get about 70% of all CAPEX although this varies considerably across the various business units. We found it surprising that investments outside Colombia will get 11% of total Exploration and Production investment (US$654M) even though today, these represent only about 1% of current production.

Gran Tierra announced its capital expenditures (CAPEX) Budget for 2013 will be US$363M of which US$295M will be spent on drilling and seismic activities. Colombia will receive US$224M or 62% of the total. The company will spend US$67M on Brazil but may spend more if initial onshore exploration results prove positive. Its production guidance for 2013 is 20,000bd net of working interest and royalties, which would be about 33% more than 3Q12.

Pacific Rubiales published an operational report full of interesting information but the real jaw-dropper was the growth in the venerable Rubiales field since receiving National Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA) permission on August 8th to increase water injection. The field had produced (gross before royalties and working interest) 169mbd in July and that was the third month in a row that production had dropped. Production was only slightly better in August at 170mbd. But since then Rubiales’ field production has grown at 4% per month and the company says it is currently “in excess of 200 mbd” – 30mbpd higher than in July.

With so much doom and gloom around the Colombian hydrocarbons industry it’s nice to celebrate some good news. The graph shows MinMinas reported gross production (before royalties and working interest) the Las Maracas field and Petroamerica’s recently reported November figure. Production is up over 500% since July.

National radio station W radio announced that Omega Energy Colombia has bought the assets of Russian oil giant Lukoil. The assets consist of the Condor association contract in the Llanos basin, foothills area. Lukoil had 70% of the contract in partnership with Ecopetrol. The estimated reserves are 6.09M boe but nothing has been produced since 2007 (3,700 boe for the year).

On November 19, 2012 we reported that Pacific Rubiales was buying C&C Energy in an all stock deal. Now in a press release, Fitch reports they rate the deal neutral to positive because “Pacific Rubiales’ production profile will improve through this transaction, as C&C’s lighter crude production will provide Pacific Rubiales with a more favorable diluent source to transport its heavy crude production. Pacific Rubiales estimates that this acquisition will represent savings of approximately USD376 million per year on diluent cost.”

Suroco Energy announced its 3Q12 results. The chart shows production net of Working Interest and Royalties was up 27% sequentially after having been stalled for two quarters. Alastair Hill, Suroco’s President and CEO commented, “During the third quarter we achieved a record average production rate of 1,111 barrels per day net to the Corporation after royalties and in September we experienced our best single monthly average with 1,232 barrels per day net to the Corporation after royalties. The three Cohembi wells drilled during the quarter helped us to delineate the north-western area of the field and extend the proven oil-bearing area.”

On November 22 Reyes Reinoso Yánez, a chemical engineer from Venezuela, took over as president (e) of the Cartagena refinery (Reficar). Reinoso took office after Orlando Cabrales Martínez quit for personal reasons.

We reported earlier in the week that the Pacific Rubiales-C&C Energy deal had given a boost to the share prices of other Colombia-focused companies. The question was whether the boost would be sustainable: would the “animal spirits” (as one of our experts put it) continue to hold or will the reality that PRE did the deal with C&C and not with someone else bring prices back to earth? As the chart shows, the answer seems to be that the boost was generally sustained.