Like all oil and gas companies in the Colombian market, Petrominerales must be concerned with its investment in community relations. These investments fall into two buckets: compliance and long term, sustainable, program-oriented initiatives.
As reported by newspaper El Nuevo Siglo, there are now about 50,302 oil service workers in Colombia. Of these, 18,401 (36%) are unqualified staff, 18,431 (37%) have a technical degree and 13,470 (27%) are professionals. 15.636 (31%) are permanent employees and 34.667 (69%) have a temporary contract.
Newspaper El Neuvo Siglo reports on the growth of bio-fuels from a forum called “Past, present and future of bio-fuels policy in Colombia”. It says that demand has doubled in just the past two years. The current mix is 8% bio-fuel to 92% conventional gasoline and the industry wants that to increase to 10%. Bio-diesel is another opportunity especially in large scale mining operations.
Water issues are especially important in Colombia given the uncertain framework around unconventional hydrocarbons and the significant use of water both as an input and an output of heavy oil extraction in the Llanos. Recently the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development brought together a number of government and academic groups to study underground aquifers. From a MinAmbiente press release, translated, and with comments by Hydrocarbons Colombia.
Despite the wild swings of global benchmarks, most Colombian producers managed to keep their prices steady, losing only US$1 or so from their 2Q12 prices. But Ecopetrol’s average realized price was down over US$4 and C&C Energy’s price was down nearly US$5.
Ecopetrol had its last board meeting of the year on Sunday December 16th which approved the capital expenditure (CAPEX) budget for 2013. The company will invest over US$9.5B or about the equivalent of a quarter’s worth of revenue across all its varied businesses. The ‘mother ship’ will get about 70% of all CAPEX although this varies considerably across the various business units. We found it surprising that investments outside Colombia will get 11% of total Exploration and Production investment (US$654M) even though today, these represent only about 1% of current production.
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