The La Lizama story will not die. The Inspector General’s office has opened investigations against a number of Ecopetrol (NYSE:EC) executives and against senior leadership in the ANH, the ANLA and the Santander regional environmental authority (CAS). Two ECP VPs have been suspended for three months.
Royalty money continues to be allocated to projects, but poor execution dulls its impact. A housing project in Arauca is the latest example. This story and others in our latest periodic summary of royalties-related stories.
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.
Oil production in Colombia showed stable performance throughout 2017, but how have the main operators and producers in the country fared? The National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) recently reported 4Q17 figures per field and we updated our database to analyze oil companies’ production metrics.
No, we are not talking about Gustavo Petro’s plans to shift Colombia’s energy matrix to renewables, although that might turn out to be one part of the solution. Instead, MinMinas is looking for medium and long-term proposals without prejudging the technology.