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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.

This past week, on August 7^th, President Iván Duque completed one full year in office. A number of editorial writers evaluated the president at the completion of this milestone. We have been positive about the ANH and MinMinas (now known as MinEnergia) but the government in total has struggled with its grades.

In his most recent Op-ed, the President of the Colombian Association of Petroleum Engineers (Acipet), Carlos Leal, questioned environmentalists ‘fight’ in Colombia.

We are now firmly in the third quarter and so it is time to look back at how the shares of Colombia-focused producers performed in the second quarter. The short answer is that they continued to track global indexes, indicating that big-picture forces are more important (at the aggregate level) than Colombia-specific forces.