News and AnalysIs for

In our analysis of Ecopetrol’s 3Q15 results we reported that CEO Juan Carlos Echeverry had said the NOC was outperforming its global peers.

At this time of year, companies are in the closing stages of their 2016 planning. Considering the time frame of most oil and gas investments, one input is very long-term forecasts of overall demand, at least implicitly as companies try to look at long-term prices.

The headline on Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) results was that it made money while the rest of the industry lost. Inside Colombia, the comparison is unfair because it has no rivals with the same breadth and as the above graph shows, the Transport sector save the day.

A signature in Havana will presumably mean the end of terrorist threats against economic infrastructure by the Farc (and soon afterward maybe the ELN). But that does not mean that the post-conflict will be without challenges.

Well that could not last. After two straight months of increasing, prices fell again and we are now at a new low for past half-decade.

The fundamentals are not trending positively and so our readers are not planning for a brighter 2016.

This week “What we think” is really “What you think”. We broke our annual Quick Pulse Survey into two pieces, one addressing our traditional look ahead at 2016 and one addressing what we think is the main government policy issue at this time: incentives to get companies exploring again.

Editor’s Note: Jaime Checa is one of Colombia’s most respected geophysicists. When he speaks the industry listens. Here he reflects on the sorry state of onshore seismic in 2015, looking beyond the easy excuse of low oil prices.

The arrival of El Niño has added a whole new dynamic to an ongoing debate raging along the Caribbean coast over the price of natural gas, as questions on the long term rates and short term supply alike fill the press.

In early 2013, Naturgas’ Eduardo Pizano and the ANDI’s then VP of Mining, Oil and Energy, Santiago Angel Urdinola staged a very public battle over whether Colombia had or did not have sufficient gas reserves to last into the next decade.