Thursday, May 21st, 2026
President Gustavo Petro launched a wide-ranging attack on Ecopetrol, political opponents, and business sectors in an extended post on X, centering his fire on what he described as the state oil company’s refusal to reduce its gas demand in the face of an accelerating climate crisis.
Arrow Exploration Corp. reported encouraging results from two separate wells on its Tapir Block in Colombia’s Llanos Basin in back-to-back press releases issued May 8 and May 13, 2026, covering an appraisal well at Mateguafa and an exploration well at the newly drilled Icaco prospect.
Ecopetrol set a new operational record in early May when it loaded a 500,000-barrel fuel oil cargo onto a vessel at the Puerto Bahía maritime terminal near Cartagena — double its previous maximum for a single shipment.
Colombia’s economy is being throttled by what financial corporation Corficolombiana calls an “invisible tax” — the accumulated weight of regulatory complexity, institutional fragmentation, and administrative bottlenecks that drive up costs without appearing in any official fiscal accounting.
A new CEPAL statistical report on tax collection across Latin America and the Caribbean through 2024 finds a region making incremental progress on revenue mobilization — but still structurally distant from developed-economy benchmarks, and dangerously exposed to commodity price swings in the countries that matter most.
The Frontera that filed Q1 2026 results is not the Frontera that operated Colombian oil fields. By the time the press release was issued on May 15, the company had already reclassified its entire Colombian E&P portfolio as discontinued operations under IFRS 5, following the execution of the arrangement agreement with Parex Resources.
Six Colombian hydrocarbon industry associations — ACGGP, ACIEM, ACIPET, the ACP, CAMPETROL, and NATURGAS — jointly published a technical policy document on May 14 titled Hydrocarbons for the Development of Colombia, timed deliberately to land on the desk of whoever wins the presidential election on May 31.
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