The second round of Colombia’s Presidential Election is over and, as we reported in our newsletter today, Iván Duque will be the country’s next President. See our analysis article for what that will mean for the oil and gas industry. As before, we wanted to see how the top oil-producing departments behaved.
As the polls predicted, the Centro Democrático’s candidate, Iván Duque, won the Colombian Presidential elections and will be sworn into office on August 7th. Investors breathed a collective sigh of relief. Had his opponent, Gustavo Petro, won, uncertainty would have increased considerably.
About a month ago, one of the country’s leading business newspapers, published an article on Ecopetrol’s (NYSE:EC) results with the brilliant title “Ecopetrol does not give up its position as the leader in hydrocarbons”. Considering that the NOC produces ten times what the next company does this does not show a lot of insightful analysis on the part of the headline writer.
Raul Gallegos is Control Risk’s Associate Director based in Bogotá and he keeps an eye on extractive industries. Here he addresses the challenge of royalties in the context of social conflict and with the backdrop of the upcoming Presidential Elections.
While reporting on Frontera’s (TSX:FEC) results, we realized that we were continuing to tell an old story. It was time to tell Frontera’s story not one from the past.
As I said a few weeks ago, we are rereading / reediting / rewriting the peace-process summaries that we wrote from 2013 through mid-2017. A frequent writing error was to confuse singular and plural when referring to the FARC; ”the FARC is” versus “the FARC are”. I was reminded of this problem when reading our recent security summary.
Higher oil prices have knocked gas off its perch as Colombia’s most profitable hydrocarbon, at least on a netback basis. We update our charts with the results of 1Q18 and comment about what this shift might mean.
There was some suspense but, in the end, no surprises: right-wing candidate Iván Duque will battle left-wing candidate Gustavo Petro in the second round of Colombia’s presidential elections on June 17th.
Now here is a little-known fact: higher oil prices lead to better netbacks! OK so it is painfully obvious. Welcome… but painfully obvious none-the-less.
The Works-for-Taxes program is one of the most interesting ideas by the Colombian Government that we have seen in a long time. It is long-established in Peru and companies that saw it work there have advocated for its adoption in Colombia.