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 Port of Tumaco on Colombia’s Pacific coast received a shipment of 103,000 barrels of fuel from the Cartagena refinery on June 20, in what Minister of Mines and Energy Edwin Palma framed as the reactivation of a strategic logistics node that will diversify fuel supply routes for Nariño and the country’s southwestern departments.
As we write this article, on Tuesday, June 30th, Brent is US$72.99 a barrel on FT.com. Who knows where it may be when you read this, likely some time on Wednesday, July 1st?
The prospective end of the US-Iran conflict and the expected reopening of the Strait of Hormuz have sent crude prices sharply lower, with Brent falling into the US$70s per barrel, levels not seen since before the outbreak of hostilities.
Ecopetrol and Germany’s development cooperation agency GIZ signed an agreement on June 19 to conduct feasibility and engineering studies for a Power-to-Liquid pilot plant at the Cartagena refinery, aimed at producing e-SAF — electronic Sustainable Aviation Fuel — from green hydrogen.
Ecopetrol has completed its first direct export of petroleum coke (petcoke) to Japan, shipping 50,000 tons to a Japanese steelmaker for use in vehicle production, a transaction that represents 5 percent of the Refinería de Cartagena’s total annual petcoke exports and marks a strategic shift in how the state oil company commercializes one of its industrial byproducts.
Jorge Enrique Bedoya, president of the Colombian Farmers’ Society (SAC), drew a direct line between the Petro government’s restrictions on oil and gas exploration and the country’s dependence on imported fertilizers, arguing that greater domestic gas production could have enabled Colombia to manufacture urea at home rather than buying it from Trinidad and Tobago, the United States, China, and Russia.
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.
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.
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