César Pabón, director of economic research at Corficolombiana, makes the central analytical argument in this Bloomberg Línea piece: Colombia’s next president faces an unusually narrow window to reverse the damage of the Petro era’s exploration freeze, and the cost of missing it is compounding.
Colombia’s fiscal crisis has pushed hydrocarbon policy to the center of the 2026 presidential campaign, forcing every major candidate — regardless of ideology — to grapple with the same uncomfortable arithmetic: the country’s public finances depend heavily on oil revenues, even as the sector faces declining reserves and mounting pressure over energy security.
The oil and gas services industry body Campetrol delivered a bleak April snapshot that captures Colombia’s gas predicament in two simultaneous trends pulling in opposite directions: imports hit a record high while the drilling activity needed to reverse the country’s declining domestic production fell further.
Arrow Exploration Corp. reported encouraging results from two separate wells on its Tapir Block in Colombia’s Llanos Basin in back-to-back press releases issued May 8 and May 13, 2026, covering an appraisal well at Mateguafa and an exploration well at the newly drilled Icaco prospect.
Six Colombian hydrocarbon industry associations — ACGGP, ACIEM, ACIPET, the ACP, CAMPETROL, and NATURGAS — jointly published a technical policy document on May 14 titled Hydrocarbons for the Development of Colombia, timed deliberately to land on the desk of whoever wins the presidential election on May 31.
The Colombian oil equipment and services industry association Campetrol released its 2025 Oil Sector Balance, covering second-half 2025 performance, full-year close data, and early 2026 figures, with a supplementary analysis of Venezuela’s hydrocarbons industry drawn from a sectoral outreach mission Campetrol conducted in the neighboring country.
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.
Colombia’s environmental licensing authority ANLA granted Frontera Energy an environmental license to explore the VIM-46 block, an Exploratory Drilling Area located in the municipality of Magangué, Bolívar, in the Lower Magdalena Valley.
The decision to halt the Komodo deepwater well – a joint project between Ecopetrol and Occidental Petroleum in the Colombian Caribbean – did not merely delay an exploration campaign.
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