The Barrancabermeja refinery, Ecopetrol’s flagship processing facility in Santander, has reached its highest crude throughput in twenty years, processing 245,500 bd of crude — a level that has since climbed further to approximately 246,000 bd, according to Milton Lara, the plant’s acting general manager.
President Gustavo Petro used a cabinet meeting to announce that expiring Ecopetrol contracts would no longer receive automatic extensions, instead being subjected to open competitive processes.
Five of Ecopetrol’s nine board members received an extraordinary summons by email on the morning of April 15 and gathered at Casa de Nariño with President Gustavo Petro — a meeting that triggered a sharp dispute between competing accounts of what was discussed and what may come next for Ricardo Roa.
Ecopetrol acting president Juan Carlos Hurtado confirmed that the company is actively pursuing a US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) license to allow both Ecopetrol and Grupo ISA to import gas from Venezuela and reactivate bilateral energy projects — the clearest public signal yet that the NOC views Venezuela as a near-term operational priority rather than a long-term aspiration.
Ecopetrol has commissioned Colombia’s first wet-pelletized sulfur solidification plant at its Refinería de Cartagena (Reficar), opening a new downstream business line that could supply up to 70% of domestic demand and generate export volumes for European markets.
The Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) has presented Ecopetrol with a 150-page list of demands for a new three-year Collective Labor Agreement covering 2026–2028, setting up what could be a contentious negotiation at Colombia’s largest company.
In a televised council of ministers in February, Colombian President Gustavo Petro said Ecopetrol would be bankrupt if oil fell below US$60/bl. We don’t expect Petro to get his sums right but we thought we’d better check, just in case.
A comparative analysis published by El Espectador, drawing on five sector experts and research from Corficolombiana and Bancolombia, finds that Ecopetrol’s financial deterioration since 2022 has been materially more severe than that of comparable state oil companies in the region – and that the gap cannot be explained by oil price movements alone.
The Unión Sindical Obrera (USO), Ecopetrol’s principal labor union, announced the creation of a scientific committee to evaluate the feasibility of hydraulic fracturing in Colombia — a move that placed the union in direct conflict with Energy Minister Edwin Palma, a former USO president himself, who promptly called his former colleagues mistaken.
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.
2026, Hydrocarbons Colombia, All Rights Reserved.
