Colombian households are feeling the strain of rising gas prices after a sharp 13.28% increase over the last year, making gas the second-fastest rising item in the national consumer basket, surpassed only by coffee.
Colombia’s natural gas sector is at a crossroads, and the obstacle, according to Naturgas president Luz Stella Murgas, is not geological scarcity but political indecision.
Colombia’s natural gas supply gap is widening faster than expected, driven by falling production and delays in new import infrastructure.
The world’s appetite for natural gas is set to rise again, and Colombia is watching from the sidelines.
Petrobras’ (NYSE: PBR) entrance into Colombia’s offshore energy landscape could mark a turning point for the country’s energy security. Together with Ecopetrol (NYSE: ECP), the Brazilian company is leading the Sirius gas project, a deepwater discovery that could restore Colombia’s self-sufficiency in natural gas for at least a decade.
The Colombian government is reaffirming its commitment to energy security through the planned regasification plant in Ballenas, La Guajira, a cornerstone project expected to strengthen the country’s natural gas supply over the next decade.
Recently, we published an article that showed what happened when the country’s only regas facility, SPEC, closed for scheduled maintenance. One might have expected that since SPEC programmed the maintenance well in advance, some planning might have avoided any stress about shortages. We look for evidence of that planning. (UPDATE: Technical difficulties overcome and graphs and full text now loaded.)
This is the sad story we all know about gas production in Colombia. (We show Gas Delivered to the Pipeline, which impacts household consumption and thus the politics around gas.) Ecopetrol down. Everyone else also down. But for the appropriately grey area there are distinct stories.
The SPEC-maintenance crisis has passed and now we can see what happened. We estimate gas supply went down by around 120 GBTUd because, even with all MinEnergia’s efforts to find more gas, there wasn’t enough to plug the hole. That means there was not enough gas for normal demand. Who didn’t get their needs satisfied?
Ecopetrol (NYSE: EC) announced that its Social Gas Program has now connected 105,115 low-income families across 20 Colombian departments to the natural gas network, marking a major milestone in its efforts to expand clean and affordable energy access.
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