Presidential candidate Iván Cepeda, running on a platform broadly aligned with the Petro government’s ideology, used a campaign rally to outline his energy policy intentions for Ecopetrol, firmly rejecting any dilution of the state’s controlling stake in the company.
A couple of weeks ago we reported President Gustavo Petro’s declaration that Colombia would withdraw from the international investment arbitration system, leaving only local courts to settle contract disputes. We wanted to go a bit deeper into this.
Richard Francis, co-director of Sovereign Ratings for the Americas at Fitch Ratings, delivered a sober assessment of Colombia’s fiscal and economic outlook in an interview published April 6, 2026, estimating the country would need at least three to four additional years to recover the investment grade it lost in 2021.
Senior officials from Trinidad and Tobago and Colombia met in late March 2026 to explore deepening bilateral energy cooperation, reflecting both countries’ strategic interest in regional energy security.
The Ministry of Finance issued Decree 0288 on March 19, 2026, adding CoP$2.87T to the Sistema General de Regalías (SGR) budget for the 2025–2026 biennium, responding to a significant decline in royalties revenue that has reduced the resources available to Colombia’s departments and municipalities.
Energy and Mines Minister Edwin Palma represented Colombia at CERAWeek in Houston on March 25, 2026, using one of the global energy sector’s most prominent forums to advance the Petro government’s framing of the energy transition as a technically grounded, socially responsible process rather than an ideological commitment.
Three Bloomberg Línea analyses published in mid-to-late March paint a nuanced and cautionary picture of how the Middle East conflict’s energy price shock is landing across Latin America — one in which the instinct to read rising oil as a regional windfall is increasingly being challenged.
Ecopetrol has pushed back against the more optimistic timelines attached to Colombia’s energy transition, publishing a forward-looking assessment – based on UPME data – that liquid fossil fuels will remain essential to the country’s energy matrix through at least 2040, even under transition scenarios, and that gasoline in particular is heading toward significant import dependence.
President Gustavo Petro announced on March 25, 2026 that Colombia will withdraw from the international investment arbitration system – the framework under which foreign investors can bring disputes against states before private arbitral tribunals rather than national courts – citing the structural bias he argues such tribunals exhibit in favor of private claimants over sovereign governments.
A Constitutional Court ruling issued in October 2025 — Sentence T-390-25 — has sent shockwaves through Colombia’s oil and gas sector by holding Ecopetrol and its logistics subsidiary Cenit responsible for environmental and human rights damages caused by armed group attacks on the Oleoducto Trasandino (OTA), a 300-kilometer crude oil pipeline in Nariño that has been suspended since 2023 and for which no restart date exists.
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