Monday, March 23rd, 2026
Some readers may think we are ignoring the sector’s most important news: the Iran War and its impact on oil prices. Instead, we worry about reporting things you already know, especially those that are widely reported global stories. Here we update our price charts for those who use them and try to make relevant Colombia-specific comments on what are rapidly changing events.
Ecopetrol president Ricardo Roa used the company’s 2025 financial results presentation to directly address and reject allegations — circulating from anonymous sources — that Colombia’s state oil company had been deliberately withholding gas injections at fields such as Floreña to manufacture artificial shortages and sustain elevated gas prices.
Frontera Energy’s 2025 annual results, released March 18, 2026, are best understood through the lens of a company in the final stages of a strategic transformation — one that is selling off its Colombian upstream operations and reinventing itself as an infrastructure-focused business anchored by the ODL pipeline and Puerto Bahía port in Cartagena.
The Antonio Ricaurte pipeline — the 225-kilometer infrastructure connecting Lake Maracaibo to Colombia’s La Guajira department — sits at the center of the Petro government’s most ambitious near-term gas supply strategy, but a cascade of technical, legal, and contractual complications make reactivation a far longer and more costly undertaking than official rhetoric suggests.
GeoPark, the oil and gas company now led by Felipe Bayón — the former Ecopetrol president — has suffered two consecutive failures to close transformative acquisitions in Colombia, leaving it without the scale it was seeking while Ecopetrol and Canadian rival Parex Resources step into the positions GeoPark had coveted.
Colombia’s Ministry of Mines and Energy has confirmed a high-level meeting with U.S. government officials to advance an OFAC license that would allow Ecopetrol and ISA to reactivate bilateral energy projects with Venezuela.
The Petro government has formally ended gasoline subsidies paid through the national budget, while simultaneously defending an ongoing cycle of pump price reductions now complicated by a sharp spike in international crude prices driven by Middle East conflict.
2026, Hydrocarbons Colombia, All Rights Reserved.
