News and AnalysIs for

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.

Higher oil prices gave E&P stocks a boost and Colombian-committed companies were no exception.

The USO is the union for Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) workers and, perhaps surprisingly, one of the loudest voices against the oil industry and the ‘evil multinationals’ who dare to operate in Colombia.

The drop in crude oil production during 3Q16 was the steepest quarter-over-quarter drop since 4Q01, well before anyone in the Colombian government thought about transforming the industry.

I should have written this in January where the analogy is somewhat more timely but diversifying the Colombian economy is like resolving to exercise more. Everyone agrees it is a good idea but it never seems to happen.