A companion article by our Managing Editor deals with the question “Is Colombia too dependent on oil and gas?” It also addresses MinHacienda Mauricio Cárdenas’ contention that the industry is, in his words, ‘irrelevant’.
A few weeks ago, we questioned the feasibility of MinMinas’ 2017 crude production target of 875mbd. No one jumped on us – or, frankly, congratulated us for our insightful analysis.
This past weekend, a friend of mine who is not in the industry asked me what exactly our newsletter talks about. So I gave the elevator pitch and that got me thinking about why we choose these topics.
So January is in the books. The groundhogs have pronounced on winter (split decision) and as an old boss of mine used to say with a slight note of panic in his voice “One twelfth of the year has gone by! One third of the first quarter is over! What have we accomplished!”
Last week we separately published graphs of our monthly counts of security incidents and of blockades in all of 2016.
Rather than scatter my predictions over a number of articles, I decided to consolidate them in one. At the very least, it will be easier to check how I / we did next January.
Noticing GTE’s (TSX:GTE) huge growth in YE2016 reserves and thinking about Ecopetrol’s (NYSE:EC) policy to revert all Association contracts got us thinking about concentration / consolidation in the Colombian oil and gas industry.
Last year at this time I wrote a kind of ‘predictions’ article trying to look ahead into 2016. So I thought in the interests of ‘full disclosure’ that I should check how well I did at predicting how 2016 was going to turn out.
Maybe we should not take MinMinas crude oil production targets too seriously. They are less predictions than wishful thinking to justify budgetary calculations. But we cannot help trying to see if they make any sense whatsoever.
I doubt many of our readers were off from Christmas to today – although it appears most Colombian political decision makers were (as usual). But you were probably off for at least some of the period so an overview should be helpful.
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