Dear A: Thanks for the Don Julio Reposado the other night in your apartment. It was the perfect antidote to a damp and cold Bogotá night. I looked up the El Tiempo anti-fracking article that had disturbed you so much and it was full of so many half-truths and complete falsehoods, that I wrote this letter to clarify it for you.
At the Oil and Gas Summit, both MinMinas Maria Fernanda Suárez and ANH head Luis Miguel Morelli promised a competitiveness study to see where Colombia had to improve its regulation. The well-respected Canadian extractive-industry think-tank, the Fraser Institute (FI) has either done that for them or given them a place to start.
The ‘100-days’ stories were a week or two ago and I had planned to write a ‘Duque-year-end-in-review’ article on December 17th, my last ‘long-form’ article of the year. But well-respected think-tank Inter-American Dialogue published this report last Friday and I thought I should take advantage of the multiple points of view.
On paper, Colombia has about 11 years of gas reserves. But the production forecast shows shortfalls occurring very shortly. Getting investors to search for domestic gas should be a regulatory priority but a better gas netback would also help their decisions.
This week we have a thoughtful (and beautifully written) reflection by Luis Pacheco on the great controversy of our industry: the struggle to find a balance between development and conservation. MinAmbiente Ricardo Lozano’s set phrase – produce while conserving and conserve while producing – sounds great but reality is far more complex as Luis shows us here.
The results for Colombia-focused companies are published, so we updated our statistics on oil prices and netbacks. It was not a great quarter but not a bad one either. As always, individual results may vary; we are looking at Colombian averages.
The recent First Oil and Gas Summit was an opportunity to answer two important questions: how is the industry doing and are the government and the industry on the same page?
Last week’s article updating our oil price and future’s charts gave the Analyst an inspiration. Unfortunately, the ‘muse’ appeared just when he was already up against the deadline so it had to wait for this week.
The Minister of Mines and Energy (MinMinas) announced that 10 experts will define the future of fracking in Colombia. We looked at who was appointed, what might be known about their pre-conceptions and what the implications might be.
We usually update our oil price graphs at the beginning of October but we had other things we thought were more timely. However, by publishing at the end of the month, we captured the slide that has taken place. Trick or treat? Boo!
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