Sirius, the offshore Caribbean gas project Colombia is counting on to restore natural gas self-sufficiency, faces a bottleneck from a single unresolved prior consultation with Taganga, an artisanal fishing community near Santa Marta, financial demands Ecopetrol has characterized in stark terms.
The Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos announced the creation of the Grupo Estratégico de Aceleración de Proyectos de Gas (GEAPG), a temporary institutional coordination mechanism aimed at accelerating new natural gas volumes into the market as El Niño approaches.
Colombia’s reported natural gas production fell 8.36% year-on-year in July 2026, from 1,196 mmcfd to 1,096 mmcfd, extending a decline that has held in every month of 2026 so far.
Vanti president Rodolfo Anaya said the Sandía gas discovery, located in the Caribbean near the Sirius field, could double Colombia’s gas reserves once official reports from operators Ecopetrol and Petrobras confirm its scale — a potentially pivotal find given the country’s ongoing loss of energy self-sufficiency.
Drummond Energy is abandoning its planned regasification terminal in Ciénaga, Magdalena, to focus entirely on developing unconventional shale gas in Cesar, betting on President Abelardo De la Espriella’s fracking-friendly stance.
Colombia’s electricity demand is projected to grow roughly 10% between 2026 and 2030, according to UPME estimates cited at Andeg’s 13th Energy Forum, straining both generation supply and the transmission network.
Colombia’s liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) user base grew from 59,000 to more than 372,000 between 2015 and 2025 — an increase of over 300,000 — with roughly 95% of those users belonging to strata 1 and 2.
Aquiles Mercado opens his El Heraldo column with the etymology of a “leonine contract” – from Aesop’s fable of the lion who partners with others to hunt, then keeps the whole spoils – to argue that Colombia’s high LNG import prices aren’t unfair or predatory, but simply the market pricing a scarce good controlled by whoever sells it.
Ecopetrol’s own board has assumed for months that Sirius, the Caribbean gas megaproject, will likely slip a year past its publicly stated 2030 start date to 2031. When did they plan to tell us?
Ecopetrol’s gas sales volume fell 22.1% in the second quarter of 2026, with gas now representing just 6.9% of the group’s total sales — down sharply from 10.6% in 2Q22, when Gustavo Petro took office.
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