News and AnalysIs for

The Ministry of Mines and Energy used its July 9 four-year management balance to deliver a pointed political message to the incoming De la Espriella administration: suspending the energy sector transition handover process at the precise moment Colombia is preparing for an El Niño episode is, in the ministry’s words, “profoundly irresponsible.”

Venezuela’s interim government published sweeping new petroleum sector regulations on July 9, following up on changes to the petroleum law introduced in recent months.

Tomás de la Calle is back, this time looking at the country’s declining gas reserves and wondering about the UPME’s role in getting us to here … and getting us back to self-sufficiency.

The conventional explanation for Latin America’s electric vehicle boom, as Bloomberg Línea documented for Uruguay this month, is straightforward: when gasoline costs US$7.60 a gallon – the highest in the region – the economics of switching to electric become irresistible.

The Alberta court’s June 24^th authorization for Canacol to void its gas contracts has generated a widening circle of sector responses that go beyond the immediate Cerro Matoso crisis, touching distribution companies, the coal sector, industrial associations, and legal scholars, all of whom converged on a single point: the decisive chapter will be written not in Calgary but in Bogotá.

Two concurrent market developments are repositioning liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as a strategic energy alternative in Colombia and both are being driven by the same underlying force: the accelerating collapse of domestic natural gas supply at a moment when imported gas is becoming too expensive for the country’s interior regions to absorb.