News and AnalysIs for

Carlos Leal, Head of the Colombian Association of Petroleum Engineers (Acipet), spoke about the industry’s situation and the role of Petroleum Engineers to guarantee the sector’s sustainability.

Average oil netbacks had a recent peak in 2Q18 and since then have been falling back. Oil is now within US$6 of gas on an equivalent barrel basis. Not enough perhaps to make a company change strategy but maybe to change some resource allocation decisions.

Only tomorrow will we know if Geopark responds to Frontera’s counteroffer for VIM 22 and the ANH’s first round of its Permanent Competitive Process (PPAA) will complete officially only on the 15^th of July. But I think the ANH should already be breaking out the vintage soda water, declaring this round a success.

When you talk to those in the industry, they are generally upbeat about how things are going in both the short and medium term. Unless you are Ocensa. Then things are going badly. Very badly. Horribly in fact. At least, that is what it tells the regulator.

We might not always agree with the government’s Mining and Energy Planning Unit (UPME) but it is the authoritative source of long-term production forecasts. Recently it updated its production scenarios through 2038.

Women in Mining Colombia, IFC and the Canadian Embassy, with the support of the MinMinas, the ANM, the Australian Embassy and a number of members of the Colombian extractive industries, have launched the Gender ToolKit  – A Toolkit of Actions and Strategies for Oil, Gas, and Mining Companies – an initiative to promote diversity and inclusion in sectors traditionally dominated by men.

As we reported, recently the first ‘window’ of the new ‘permanent’ block assignment process (known as PPAA for its initials in Spanish) passed its first hurdle successfully. In this article, we look at the results, based on the notes we took at the event. Official results, have been published confirming our estimation of the leading bidder for each block.

Tuesday, June 4, 2019 marks the first block assignment process since July 2014, nearly five years ago. Much has happened and oil prices – a primary determinant of investment and so participation – are still well below where they were during the last auction. Here is the announced list of qualified participants.

An anonymous reader reacted strongly to a recent article where the ANLA was talking about its operational improvements.  Our reader’s point is that it is a waste of time and effort to look for operational improvements to a process that is fundamentally flawed to begin with. Here is the text of the email they wrote plus our Bottom-Line reaction.

The ANH recently published field-level crude-oil production data for 4Q18, allowing us to update our database and look at where growth – or decline – took place. Overall production was up more than 11mbd in 2018 versus 2017 but this is usually due to a long list of growing fields (winners) offset but an equally long or longer list of declining fields (losers).