Minority shareholders of Ecopetrol proposed Roberto Steiner Sampedro as an independent member of the company’s board. Steiner will be included for the position in the ninth row of the sheet that the Ministry of Finance will submit to the General Assembly of Shareholders. To this end, the minority shareholders submitted a “Shareholders’ Agreement” signed by representatives of seven pension funds.
Interoil has been telling the market they are getting out of Colombia for several months now. Yesterday they announced the sale of their exploration assets to Trayectoria Oil and Gas. Interoil says they received US$2M in cash for its working interest in the Altair and COR-6 blocks and avoided US$26M in exploration costs. The transaction is subject to approval by creditors and the ANH. Their working interest in the producing block LLA-47 is still on the market.
Radio Nacional de Colombia reports that according to the Colombian Petroleum Association (ACP), foreign investment will decline despite the country’s reserves increasing this year. Oil industry representatives said that “with the drilling of 135 new wells, the oil industry hopes to increase hydrocarbon reserves, currently estimated at 2,200 million barrels,” adding that “findings such as those achieved by Canacol in January 2012, in the Magdalena River middle valley with a daily production of 1,242 barrels per day, reinforces the official forecasts that the country could reach 41,000 million barrels in 2030.”
Gran Tierra recently issued a press release on its reserves for year-end 2012. The good news is that the company’s Colombian oil reserves 2P (Proved and Probable) are up 34% over 2011. Proved (P1) reserves are up 22% and Probable (P2) are up 85%. The bad news is that Colombian 2P gas reserves are down 64% although Proved gas reserves are only down 35%. Gas now represents only 5% of the company’s Colombian 2P reserves. Argentina gas reserves have also declined but the growth in oil in Colombia, Argentina and Brazil is sufficient to push 1P reserves up 20% and 2P reserves 15% on a total company basis. The official long-form filing may not appear until the end of this month and the company gave no explanation of the decline in gas reserves in its press release.
The Hydrocarbons International Forum ‘Perspectives and value of companies in the sector’, organized by the School of Advanced Management Studies (Cesa) with support from the University of Alberta’s School of Business, will be held in Bogota on February 20. The forum will discuss investment opportunities in the mining and energy sector, access to capital markets for companies in Colombia and the valuation of oil companies in the global arena.
Business newspaper Portafolio reported that Paula Acosta, deputy director of National Planning Department (DNP), said the National Royalties Fund has 1,000 pending projects amounting to US$727B, even though after the royalties reform Legislative Act was issued, the government decided to liquidate it next December. (This is the fund for the old distribution scheme.)
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