Our readers do not need to go through the long and dreadful story of the Paramo of Santurbán, the country’s biggest gold deposit. In short, environmentalists have long been fighting the development of this area and when science failed to confirm that the entire mountain needed to be protected, they went the political route and had the area declared a park. This left many companies with mining concessions “high-and-dry”.Ecogold – formerly known as Greystar – had apparently sunk over US$450M in developing its property which was at the center of the firestorm. Now government officials are confused about what comes next.
Business newspaper La Republica reports that the mining and energy locomotive is slowing its advance due to terrorist attacks. In July 2012 the Cerrejon suffered seven attacks while Ecopetrol reported 49 to September of the same year. This caused sector goals in 2012 to not be fully met. “Without doubt the reported attacks influenced the outcome of mining GDP, which slowed last year,” said María Constanza García, National Mining Agency (ANM) president.
This week, MinHacienda Mauricio Cardenas went to the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland to sell the Colombian success story. Earlier in the week he told Bloomberg he was not looking for foreign direct investment but was looking to sell the country’s bonds. From a MinHacienda press release, translated and with comments by Hydrocarbons Colombia.
We have not published these statistics from Campetrol for a while and they are somewhat old considering all the evidence of drilling activity in 4Q12. They do indicate where the action is and the Free / Contract statistics are evidence of availability for those who need equipment (for glass half full types) or perhaps lack of activity (for glass half empty types). Utilization was at 70% in October 2012 versus 83% in November 2011. (Note that our numbers vary somewhat from Campetrol’s figures. See the Methodological Note at the bottom of the article.)
Local news site NoticiasdeVillavicencio.com reports that inhabitants of the municipality of Cumaral (Meta) denounced that cracks in the area’s mountains have appeared due to oil companies’ seismic work.. The environment secretary of Villavicencio, Nelson Vivas Mora, said it is important to protect the rights and interests of the Cumaral residents.
In an interview with Cali newspaper El Pais, the economist Salomon Kalmanovitz spoke about, among other things, the recent tax reform, mining and oil. According Kalmanovitz the reform was not made in depth. He said: “It was mostly tax cuts and the increase was a congressional initiative and not of the government: a one point in the income tax rate from 33 to 34%”.
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