ELN attacks Colombia's Caño-Limón pipeline

Despite the severe oil crisis created by a collapse in global oil prices, the situation wasn’t entirely negative for the Colombian oil industry: the sector had been enjoying a lull in rebel attacks against the country’s oil infrastructure. That changed over the weekend, when the National Liberation Army launched two bomb attacks against Colombia’s Caño-Limón Covenas oil pipeline.

Colombian state oil company Ecopetrol told the press that it has shut down pumping operations on the pipeline during repairs. Seeking Alpha noted that the Caño-Limón pipeline has the capacity to move up to 210,000 barrels crude per day, from Occidental Petroleum’s fields near Colombia’s border with Venezuela, to the port of Covenas.

Elsewhere, El Espectador reported on the release of the first report of the Extractive Industry Transparency Initiative (EITI), jointly prepared by the government, private industry, and civil society. The article explained that this initiative was started to provide a safe space for dialogue on mining, one of the most polarizing issues in the country.

According to Santiago Ángel Urdinola, president of the Colombian Mining Association, one of the main takeaways from the EITI was the progress made by the DIAN, the Colombian customs and tax agency, in assembling complete and reliable data on the country’s extractive sector. Whereas in some countries, the gap between revenues reported by private companies and the government can reach 40%, in Colombia, it was just 0.4%.

Ultimately though, this is just the start of a much longer process, and all of the actors are confident that they EITI will bring greater transparency to Colombia’s extractive sector.