Monday, April 6th, 2026
Three Bloomberg Línea analyses published in mid-to-late March paint a nuanced and cautionary picture of how the Middle East conflict’s energy price shock is landing across Latin America — one in which the instinct to read rising oil as a regional windfall is increasingly being challenged.
Despite a fraught electoral environment, rising interest rates, fiscal imbalances, and a 15% decline in total foreign direct investment in 2025 to US$11.5B, Colombia has opened 2026 with a striking wave of corporate transactions – a paradox that analysts trace to structural investment dynamics that operate on timelines longer than any single electoral cycle.
Promigas posted stable financial results for 2025 – revenues of CoP$6.7T (+1%), net profit up 2% to CoP$1.07T, and EBITDA flat at CoP$2.4T – but the more significant strategic story is the company’s deepening transformation from a pure-play gas infrastructure operator into a diversified energy platform, even as its gas operations delivered some of their most consequential results to date.
A post-mortem analysis by Asoenergía – the Colombian Association of Large Industrial and Commercial Energy Consumers – of the October 2025 maintenance shutdown of the SPEC LNG regasification terminal in Cartagena has revealed how poor supply planning drove residential gas contract prices to nearly three times their normal level in just a matter of days.
The Refinería de Cartagena (Reficar) returned to normal operations by March 24, 2026, nine days after an electrical supply failure struck the facility on March 15. Ecopetrol confirmed that all processing units are operating normally and that the supply of refined fuels to the national market was maintained throughout the incident.
The decision to halt the Komodo deepwater well – a joint project between Ecopetrol and Occidental Petroleum in the Colombian Caribbean – did not merely delay an exploration campaign.
President Gustavo Petro announced on March 25, 2026 that Colombia will withdraw from the international investment arbitration system – the framework under which foreign investors can bring disputes against states before private arbitral tribunals rather than national courts – citing the structural bias he argues such tribunals exhibit in favor of private claimants over sovereign governments.
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