
Wednesday, April 15th, 2026
Ecopetrol exceeded its own exploration targets in 2025, drilling 16 wells against an original plan of 10 and achieving a success rate that acting president Juan Carlos Hurtado described as the best in the company’s history.



In a wide-ranging interview, Luz Stella Murgas, president of the Asociación Colombiana de Gas Natural (Naturgas), delivered a clear-eyed assessment of Colombia’s gas supply crisis that cuts against the government’s preferred framing: the country’s problem is not a shortage of gas in the ground but a persistent failure to build the political and institutional consensus needed to get it out.
With Colombia now a net gas importer and conventional production in sustained decline, energy sector voices are pushing hydraulic fracturing back onto the national agenda as the most credible lever for reversing the country’s hydrocarbon trajectory.
Ecopetrol’s acting president Juan Carlos Hurtado signaled in a press conference that the company is actively reviewing whether to revise its investment plan upward in response to the sharp rise in international crude prices triggered by the US-Israel conflict with Iran.
The ANH published gas production for January and February 2026 and the story has worsened yet again.
In his first press conference as acting president of Ecopetrol, Juan Carlos Hurtado Parra set a deliberately operational tone, laying out eight strategic priorities for the company while distancing himself from the political turbulence that preceded his appointment.
Presidential candidate Iván Cepeda, running on a platform broadly aligned with the Petro government’s ideology, used a campaign rally to outline his energy policy intentions for Ecopetrol, firmly rejecting any dilution of the state’s controlling stake in the company.