The Petro administration has designated 1.5 million hectares of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta as a Renewable Natural Resources Reserve, barring new mining concessions and hydrocarbon exploration and production contracts across the entire area.
Foreign direct investment in Colombia’s oil sector fell more than 7% year-on-year in Q1 2026, reaching US$589M against US$634M in the same period of 2025, according to Banco de la República data.
If Abelardo De la Espriella wins the June 21 runoff, Colombia’s upstream sector should expect an immediate and deliberate reversal of the Petro administration’s anti-hydrocarbon posture.
Vaca Muerta is already producing 597,300 bd from the Neuquén basin, representing two-thirds of Argentina’s national output of 885,300 bd — and Luis Barallat, BCG’s director for Iberia and South America, believes that is still early innings.
Colombia’s June 21 presidential runoff between Abelardo De la Espriella and Iván Cepeda will be, among other issues, a referendum on economic model: a pro-business, hydrocarbon-led growth agenda on one side versus a continuation of Gustavo Petro’s statist, redistributive project on the other. For the energy sector, the contrast could hardly be starker.
Three senior voices in Colombia’s energy sector used a La República forum panel on May 29 to deliver a coordinated indictment of current energy policy — and a set of prescriptions the next government will need to act on quickly if a blackout is to be avoided in the second half of the year.
The National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH) conducted a technical field inspection of Canacol Energy’s Esperanza, VIM-5, VIM-21, and VIM-44 blocks — including the Jobo and Clarinete stations — verifying investment levels, regulatory compliance, and performance against the company’s exploration and production contracts.
César Pabón, director of economic research at Corficolombiana, makes the central analytical argument in this Bloomberg Línea piece: Colombia’s next president faces an unusually narrow window to reverse the damage of the Petro era’s exploration freeze, and the cost of missing it is compounding.
The expected candidates made it through to the second round and official government candidate Iván Cepeda got the approximately 40% of the vote that the polls said he would. But Abelard de la Espriella surprised by getting over 43% and coming first.
Colombia’s oil, gas and mining sector contracted for the ninth consecutive quarter in Q1 2026, but the pace of decline slowed sharply to just 0.1% — the mildest reading in more than two years, according to data published by the national statistics agency DANE and reported by Valora Analitik.
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