Earlier this week, Colombian state-owned oil company
Ecopetrol announced
that it had established
a new company called Ecopetrol Costa Afuera Colombia S.A.S. to carry out its
offshore oil exploration and production activities. This legal reorganization
allows Ecopetrol to take advantage of recent tax break opportunities added to
Colombian law.
El Espectador noted that this announcement comes in the wake
of the discovery of an “important” gas field in the Caribbean. Although no one
knows yet exactly how large the gas field is, this announcement demonstrates
that Ecopetrol is extremely bullish about its prospects.
In other oil-related news, the Colombian National
Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) announced
that oil blocks in Colombia would no longer be auctioned off periodically in
large “rounds.” The ANH explained that oil companies had been frustrated by
having to wait for scheduled rounds in order to acquire oil fields in the
country. El Espectador explained that another change is the introduction of
Direct Assignments with Counteroffer. In this system, the ANH can receive a
proposal from an oil company for a specific area, and then open up that area
publicly for counteroffers. The report also noted that Ecopetrol solicited
extensive feedback on the new rule changes.
Lastly, the Colombian chamber of commerce for the oil
industry, Campetrol, spoke with El
Heraldo about how Colombia is one of the most expensive countries in the
world for extracting oil. According to Campetrol, Norwegian consulting company
Rystad Energy dig a studied of more than 65,000 oil fields, and listed Colombia’s
oil as the seventh-most expensive in the world.
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