Thursday, June 18th, 2026
Ecopetrol has completed its first direct export of petroleum coke (petcoke) to Japan, shipping 50,000 tons to a Japanese steelmaker for use in vehicle production, a transaction that represents 5 percent of the Refinería de Cartagena’s total annual petcoke exports and marks a strategic shift in how the state oil company commercializes one of its industrial byproducts.
Canacol Energy is pursuing a sale of its Colombian operations at speed, but with cash to sustain those operations running out on July 10, 2026, roughly three weeks away.
Venezuela has formalized a licensing agreement with Shell for the development and production of the Loran gas field, the Venezuelan side of the cross-border Loran-Manatee accumulation shared with Trinidad and Tobago.
A post-election analysis by Arteaga Latam of Colombia’s May 31 first-round presidential vote finds that the country’s 131 oil- and gas-producing municipalities delivered nearly the entire national margin for Abelardo de la Espriella over Iván Cepeda — and that those same territories could again prove decisive in Sunday’s runoff.
Deutsche Bank and Corficolombiana both published assessments on June 12 framing the same basic question ahead of Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff: what comes after the vote, and how durable will any initial market optimism prove to be?
Moody’s Ratings issued a sector-wide alert on Colombia’s energy and gas industry, warning that credit conditions for companies across the chain — generation, transmission, and distribution — will continue to deteriorate at least until the first half of 2027.
Colombia perforated 16 exploratory wells in the A2 and A3 categories between January and April 2026, one fewer than the 17 drilled in the same period of 2025 — a 5.9% decline that halts, at least provisionally, the momentum built during last year’s partial recovery.
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