News and AnalysIs for

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 17^th.

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.

Finally, the ANH published detailed, field-level results for 4Q17 so we can do our quarterly ‘Winners and Losers’ analysis. As always there was much individual variation, but winners tended to be larger than losers, hence our title.

This will be published on Monday May 14, a Colombian holiday (Ascension Day if you are curious) and the start of the final push for Colombia’s Presidential elections (on May 23^rd). Two weeks from today we should have significantly more clarity on the next Government and so significantly more clarity on oil policy for the next four years.

We are only publishing Ecopetrol’s (NYSE:EC) overall results today but we thought we would get a jump on the analysis by publishing the NOC’s Line of Business results simultaneously.