News and AnalysIs for

Portafolio reported that during the XVI Naturgas Congress, the superintendent of Domestic Public Services, César González Muñoz, said the management of the Gas Development Fee Fund budget has been inefficient, because the US$30.5M (77% of total approved projects) invested between 2007 and 2012 benefited only 54,601 of the 78,823 users the government expected to benefit.

The USO reports this week that workers at Reficar and with Oxy are getting closer to strikes, the union says because local management refuses to talk. In the Reficar case, the USO claims that executives from Bogota have contacted the union but Reficar management will not set up the mechanisms to start negotiating. In the case of Oxy workers in Arauca, the union has presented demands but the company will not budge.

Incidents were down this week to 40 just about the long term average. Again this week a higher than recent average number of the items were initiated by the Armed Forces which is a good sign. In fact, the ratio is sufficiently high to think that either the traditional media are only reporting extreme events or the Farc are relatively quiet. (On average during the past year, 75% of incidents have been initiated by the Armed Forces and this week the percentage is 90%.) Our 4-week Moving Average was up slightly at 43 incidents per week closer to what amounts to a long-term average.

This week concluded the seventh round of peace talks and both the government and the FARC commented on it. The parties issued a joint statement in which they say: “We continue to make progress on discussion of the first item on the agenda and in building agreements on issues of access and use of land, undeveloped land, property formalization, agricultural frontier and protection of reserves areas.”

RCN Radio reports that according to Pacific Rubiales’ vice president Federico Restrepo, the company has increased its oil reserves thanks to projects like the La Creciente gas field (Sucre) and others developed in Peru. Pacific also increased its reserves to 517M proved barrels with other findings which will allow oil supplies until 2027.

ProductionMinMinas recently published final oil and final gas production numbers by month for the period January to December 2012. The graph shows the distribution of production by department.