Colombia’s Auditor General — known in Spanish as the Contralora — is supposed to be responsible for assuring that the nation’s resources are well spent and that revenues reflect economic activity. Lately however, Sandra Morelli Rico has become concerned that the Environment Ministry (MinAmbiente) has not been sufficiently vigilant on environmental issues, especially in the extractive sector. We commented on her letter about non-conventional hydrocarbons extraction here. On Monday, October 22nd the office published a report criticizing a number of projects in the extractive and energy sectors for reasons which — while they will play well to certain sectors of public opinion — in some cases appear to lack a basis in fact.
This is more fun than anything else at this point. We have taken our Security Incidents Near Hydrocarbons counts and color coded the departments. The more red the color the more incidents. The fewer, the “cooler” the situation and thus the department is “blue”. We have superimposed the outlines of the major basins for reference.
The Colombian Petroleum Association (ACP) has published a press release on the negative impacts of a number of laws initiated by Congress – which are not backed by the government – that seek to increase government take and give back to local communities part of what they lost in royalties. Translated and with commentary by Hydrocarbons Colombia.
Ecopetrol and Chevron will upgrade the compression facilities at the Chuchupa field to increase its daily gas production. For this, the field will be off-line from October 30th to November 3rd. More maintenance will take place at the end of the month. From an Ecopetrol press release, translated and with commentary by Hydrocarbons Colombia.
The National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) recently published basic exploration statistics as of September 2012. From a drilling point of view the news is not good — the country is likely to fall short by 58 wells — and from a success point of view the story is even worse. Only 3 of the 93 wells drilled are reported as being productive and all 34 A3 wells that have come to a definite conclusion have been declared dry. There are still 52 A3 wells under testing. Seismic is a better story with the country likely to exceed its targets for kilometers of seismic by a comfortable margin (see chart at the bottom of this article).
The National Environmental Licensing Agency (ANLA) has issued a press release encouraging comments on a specification document for its new GeoDataBase system. The system’s goal is to unify all the environmental information that companies and the ANLA need to process an application. The idea, as described last week at the National Hydrocarbons Agency convention in Cartagena is to simplify and thus speed licensing and minimize requests for additional information.
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