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There was considerable debate among industry watchers about whether companies spent the Capex they expected to in the first half of 2018 or held the money back. As usual every case is different – and we had to make some assumptions — but it looks like they spent as expected or more, except ECP.

There is no hotter political topic in the industry at this time than unconventionals with both the Ministers of Environment and Mines and Energy making declarations recently indicating a more open approach than that of the previous government. As might be expected, this has ‘unleashed the hounds of war’ from the anti-fracking side. Here well-known geophysicist and frequent contributor Jaime Checa gives his view, rational and balanced as always, scarce attributes in today’s world.

The bottom-line for a company are its profits and/or stock market performance. But we try to take a policy perspective so our bottom-line is production and reserves. Both were rather naturally affected by the oil-price crisis and so, maybe, “nobody’s fault”. The current industry question is how fast things have reacted to upward price signals and whether policy plays a role in that. Call it the U-curve.

I promised this three weeks ago now but, fortunately, we received a couple of important expert contributions on Ecuador and the new ‘permanent’ assignment process. Now that we are officially out of the Santos era and into the Duque era, it seems less important to do this. But a promise is a promise…

This week we skip our ‘Last 8 years’ qualitative feature in favor of a guest contribution but we continue the series in our quantitative analysis column. Last week we looked at turnover in key policy positions. If policy instability put off investors, we would expect it to show up in investment and exploration statistics, which is what we look at here.

As they were going out the door, the ANH staff obviously got worried about those nasty ‘incompletes’ on the agency’s ToDo list. As we have complained many times, one of the most significant open items is – or was – the continuous assignment process, now officially dubbed the “Permanent Competitive Procedure”. Leopoldo Olavarria and his team at Norton Rose Fulbright have brought us this overview and commentary on the new procedures.

President Álvaro Uribe (2002 to 2010) had only two Minminas: Luis Ernesto Mejía and Hernando Martínez. President Juan Manuel Santos (2010 to 2018) had seven. He also had six Ministers of Environment and five ANH Presidents. Would the industry be in a different place today if President Santos had shown the same consistency as President Uribe?

From time to time, we like to look around the Latin American region and see how Colombia compares to its main rivals. This week Denton’s Jorge Neher takes a look at the off-again / on-again love affair between Ecuador and the oil industry. It seems like the mutual affection is on again and there are interesting opportunities.

On August 7^th, 2018, the Presidency of Juan Manuel Santos will come to an end. How was it on balance for the oil and gas industry? We will assemble the statistical evidence in an Analyst’s Desk article and, in this multi-part article, I look at some of the more qualitative assessments.

In our final article based on BP’s update to its energy statistics, we look at a couple of topics we do not usually extensively cover in HCC: the domestic demand side, specifically refining and electricity generation, with a closer look at renewables.