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I probably got your attention out of morbid curiosity but I will not be writing about some sordid tale of shenanigans in the back streets of Barrancabermeja. Instead, I have been reading a number of articles about ethical investment lately, and companies that ethical investors are expected to shun are referred to as “sin stocks” or “vice stocks”. Shades of Crockett and Tubbs!

This was not a good quarter for oil prices and investors seemed to take it out on oil stocks. The good news is that Colombia-focused shares were not punished any worse than their global peers.

I had to reread last week’s articles and, in doing so, I discovered an inadvertent theme. We did not plan it this way but we had a lot of articles on the environment, especially the evolution of Colombia’s energy matrix.

This article began with an innocent question by someone outside the industry “Colombia has a problem with gas?”

Nelsen Navarrete is well known in the oil and gas community. In his spare time, he supports the Colombian Engineers’ Association, ACIEM in a number of ways most importantly as the Chairman of the Board of the Cundinamarca Chapter and President of the Organizing Committee of the association’s annual energy conference, ENERCOL. In his opening speech to the congress, Navarrete and ACIEM steered a course between recognition of climate change and support for Colombia’s extractive industries.

A couple of weeks ago we wrote about oil prices concluding that “Your CFO is unhappy because prices are low and appear to be falling.” CFOs were no doubt happy in 2Q19 because netbacks (on average) were up.

Last week, the Externado University held a half-day conference on how Colombia was dealing with its climate change commitments under the Paris Accords. I went because I was interested, because I wanted to see how the oil and gas industry was treated and because I knew Ed Caldwell of Gran Tierra was going to speak.

A couple of years ago we wrote an article called Your CFO is smiling which talked about rising oil prices. Maybe it has been harder to find a smile lately and budgeting and planning season is coming up…

This week the ANH head, Luis Miguel Morelli, said that he expected to publish the so-called ‘B Team’ regulations in October and auction 20 blocks in February. Recently I had lunch with a prominent member – and cynical observer – of the industry and talk turned to the idea of auctioning mature Ecopetrol fields. I think these two ideas are closely related.

Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) published its 2Q19 and 1H19 financial results and that allowed us to update our ECP Line-of-Business (LoB) charts, something we had not done since March (based on 2018 full-year results). The Transport LoB produces less EBITDA in volume than E&P but margins continue to rise.