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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.

S&P Global Ratings cut Ecopetrol’s long-term credit rating from BB to BB- with a stable outlook in April, following its simultaneous downgrade of Colombia’s sovereign rating — the worst in the country’s history at that level.

Colombia’s March 2026 inflation reading came in at 5.56%, marking the second consecutive monthly increase since February, but the energy components of the basket told a contrasting story of deceleration rather than acceleration.

Ecopetrol’s share price has staged a striking recovery — up roughly 20% through March on the back of Brent crude surging past US$100/bbl from sub-US$70 levels before the Middle East conflict — but a convergence of analyst commentary, market data and reputational indices paints a more troubling picture of the state of Colombia’s state oil company.

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.