Tuesday, April 21st, 2026
Five of Ecopetrol’s nine board members received an extraordinary summons by email on the morning of April 15 and gathered at Casa de Nariño with President Gustavo Petro — a meeting that triggered a sharp dispute between competing accounts of what was discussed and what may come next for Ricardo Roa.
The Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) has presented Ecopetrol with a 150-page list of demands for a new three-year Collective Labor Agreement covering 2026–2028, setting up what could be a contentious negotiation at Colombia’s largest company.
In a televised council of ministers in February, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Ecopetrol would be bankrupt if oil fell below US$60/bl. We don’t expect Petro to get his sums right but we thought we’d better check, just in case.
A comparative analysis published by El Espectador, drawing on five sector experts and research from Corficolombiana and Bancolombia, finds that Ecopetrol’s financial deterioration since 2022 has been materially more severe than that of comparable state oil companies in the region – and that the gap cannot be explained by oil price movements alone.
The Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), Ecopetrol’s principal labor union, announced the creation of a scientific committee to evaluate the feasibility of hydraulic fracturing in Colombia — a move that placed the union in direct conflict with Energy Minister Edwin Palma, a former USO president himself, who promptly called his former colleagues mistaken.
The Colombian government will co-host the First International Conference on Transition Beyond Fossil Fuels in Santa Marta from April 23 to 29, organized jointly with the Netherlands.
Colombia’s energy and gas regulator CREG has opened a regulatory sandbox pilot to test potential changes to the liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) market before committing to permanent regulatory amendments.
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