Venezuela’s interim government published sweeping new petroleum sector regulations on July 9, following up on changes to the petroleum law introduced in recent months.
Tomás de la Calle is back, this time looking at the country’s declining gas reserves and wondering about the UPME’s role in getting us to here … and getting us back to self-sufficiency.
The Alberta court’s June 24th authorization for Canacol to void its gas contracts has generated a widening circle of sector responses that go beyond the immediate Cerro Matoso crisis, touching distribution companies, the coal sector, industrial associations, and legal scholars, all of whom converged on a single point: the decisive chapter will be written not in Calgary but in Bogotá.
Two concurrent market developments are repositioning liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) as a strategic energy alternative in Colombia and both are being driven by the same underlying force: the accelerating collapse of domestic natural gas supply at a moment when imported gas is becoming too expensive for the country’s interior regions to absorb.
Alcindo Moritz, president of Petrobras Colombia, used a La República interview to lay out the most detailed public timeline yet for the Sirius offshore gas megaproject — and to deliver a pointed assessment of what Colombia’s new government must do to prevent the current gas crisis from deepening further.
Luz Stella Murgas, president of the natural gas industry association Naturgas, used a detailed interview published in El Tiempo on July 6 to map what she called a “critical juncture” in the Colombian gas sector and to set out the five priorities she says cannot wait beyond the first hundred days of the De la Espriella administration.
Cerro Matoso, the ferronickel producer in Córdoba owned by CoreX following South32’s exit, confirmed on July 1 that it has reduced operations by 25% due to gas supply restrictions already imposed by Canacol — a cut the company says puts hundreds of direct jobs and contracts with local suppliers and contractors at risk, along with royalty and tax flows to both the department and the national treasury.
More than one million Colombian families still rely on firewood or charcoal for cooking — among the most polluting and health-damaging combustion sources in daily domestic use — and Ecopetrol’s Gas Social program exists to close that gap one network connection at a time.
The El Niño weather phenomenon means less water behind hydro dams, less hydroelectricity produced and more need for gas-powered thermoelectricity. That plus the need to import LNG means gas prices should be going up.
NG Energy International Corp. reported on July 2 that Magico-2X — the second well in its six-well 2026 drilling campaign at the Sinú-9 block in northern Colombia — was spud on June 26, targeting the Pre-CDO–San Cayetano formation as its primary objective.
2026, Hydrocarbons Colombia, All Rights Reserved.
