Colombia’s May 2026 headline inflation rose to 5.84%, according to DANE, with the main drivers in rental housing, water supply, food, and restaurants. Within the utilities subcomponent, however, gas performed strikingly differently: residential gas prices rose just 0.45% month-on-month, contributing a negligible 0.01 percentage points to overall inflation.
The Colombian stock market became briefly the best-performing bourse in the world on June 1, with the MSCI Colcap index surging around 6% in early trading after Abelardo de la Espriella topped the presidential first round with 43.7% of the vote, a margin well above what Wall Street consensus had expected.
Liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) — the propane-butane blend sold in cylinder form in Colombian homes — is emerging as an increasingly strategic energy source at precisely the moment the country’s natural gas supply is under the greatest pressure it has faced in years.
Colombia’s crude oil exports hit their highest level since July 2022 in April 2026, reaching US$1.62B for the month — a surge driven not by increased output but by Iran War-driven price strength in international markets.
The Petro administration has designated 1.5 million hectares of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as a Renewable Natural Resources Reserve, barring new mining concessions and hydrocarbon exploration and production contracts across the entire area.
Foreign direct investment in Colombia’s oil sector fell more than 7% year-on-year in Q1 2026, reaching US$589M against US$634M in the same period of 2025, according to Banco de la República data.
If Abelardo De la Espriella wins the June 21 runoff, Colombia’s upstream sector should expect an immediate and deliberate reversal of the Petro administration’s anti-hydrocarbon posture.
Colombia’s liquefied petroleum gas (LPG aka propane) sector is heading into a structural supply gap, and a new Cartagena terminal is positioning itself as the primary solution
Vaca Muerta is already producing 597,300 bd from the Neuquén basin, representing two-thirds of Argentina’s national output of 885,300 bd — and Luis Barallat, BCG’s director for Iberia and South America, believes that is still early innings.
Ecopetrol closed 2025 with a reserve replacement index of 1.21 – meaning it added 1.21 equivalent barrels to its proven reserves for every equivalent barrel it produced during the year. Against annual production of 248 million equivalent barrels, the company incorporated 300 million equivalent barrels of new proven reserves, a result the Asociación Colombiana de Ingenieros de Petróleos (Acipet) characterized as positive for the state oil company.
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