The Foro del Gas 2026, organized by the Bolsa Mercantil de Colombia (BMC) and the Consejo Nacional de Operación de Gas Natural (CNO-Gas), takes starts Thursday July 30th at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Bogotá, the same day SPEC’s scheduled maintenance begins, making the timing unusually pointed.
With the incoming government facing a fiscal adjustment estimated at five percentage points of GDP by 2030, a group of former finance ministers and economic research directors assembled by Valora Analitik has begun sketching the architecture of what Colombia’s next tax reform should look like and the consensus points toward structural change rather than incremental rate increases.
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.
Petro’s outgoing government filed its final tax reform before the new Congress on July 21st, placing the mining and energy sector at the center of the fiscal controversy for the second time in four years.
Tomás González, former Minister of Mines and Energy and current director of the Centro Regional de Estudios de Energía (CREE), used a recent interview with El Tiempo’s María Isabel Rueda to deliver both his most direct assessment of the energy crisis the incoming government inherits and his most explicit argument for why hydrocarbons – not just renewables – are Colombia’s path out of it.
The Secretaría Jurídica de la Presidencia had several decrees in process on July 17th accepting senior official resignations, El Tiempo’s Investigative Unit reported, as the outgoing Petro government entered its final three weeks.
The incoming De la Espriella government has made enabling unconventional hydrocarbon extraction one of its most explicit energy policy commitments and the outgoing Petro government has moved to make that path as legally difficult as possible with fewer than three weeks left in office.
President Gustavo Petro requested and received the resignation of Mines and Energy Minister Edwin Palma on July 17th, placing ANH president Pablo Yesid Fajardo in temporary charge of the ministry with just over three weeks left in the government.
With less than a month until his August 7th inauguration, president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella’s economic team completed a high-level Washington mission on July 15th, securing a concrete output from its IDB meeting: the launch of “Colombia Crece,” a joint investment attraction strategy embedded within the IDB Group’s regional LAC Crece initiative.
Vice president-elect José Manuel Restrepo met with US Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the State Department on July 15 for a 45-minute bilateral meeting that both sides described as the opening of a new chapter in Colombia-US relations, one in which energy and hydrocarbons figured as a central substantive thread beneath the diplomatic framing.
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