News and AnalysIs for

I was and then I wasn’t going to use this biweekly opinion piece to comment on desirable qualities of the new CEO of Ecopetrol. I had decided there was a high risk of publishing just as ECP announced Joaquín Gutiérrez’s appointment. But five days after the board, the NOC has made no announcement and then I saw a relevant editorial in El Heraldo.

Some might hope that gas production improves since SPEC is reaching its capacity and no other LNG import facilities have come online. That’s not the case.

Round one of the presidential elections was in May and we have had Abelardo de la Espriella (ADLE) for a month. What can we expect from now to December?

Technically it’s over. Practically speaking, it isn’t. Gustavo Petro was still president of Colombia in July and his temporary substitute for Ricardo Roa will be there until the end of the third quarter. Even if he leaves directly after the board meeting at the end of September, he will have been in charge for virtually all of the quarter.

We easily accept that 18th Century technology was radically different from today, but we can be shocked to find that human and political issues haven’t changed.

We looked at our Line-of-Business charts to understand the NOC’s 2Q26 results and to no one’s surprise, they were uniformly good and mostly due to Brent.

On Friday, August 7th Abelardo de la Espriella was sworn in as Colombia’s President for 2026 to 2030, a critical period for the county’s energy sector.

No, we are not discussing biofuels. Rather, given that this is our last “What We Think” for the Petro government, we will give our evaluation, especially of the outgoing (already gone?) MinEnergia.

The Energy Institute took over production of the annual Statistical Review of World Energy which BP had produced for decades. This was, in fact, the 75^th edition. We find it interesting for the tables and tables of energy data cut every which way that can produce thought-provoking graphs.

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.