Colombia’s fiscal crisis has pushed hydrocarbon policy to the center of the 2026 presidential campaign, forcing every major candidate — regardless of ideology — to grapple with the same uncomfortable arithmetic: the country’s public finances depend heavily on oil revenues, even as the sector faces declining reserves and mounting pressure over energy security.
The public utilities industry body Andesco issued a formal warning on May 21 that Colombia has a critical and non-extendable window of three to four months to take regulatory and operational action before El Niño drives the country into an energy supply crisis.
Three industry voices converged in the third week of May to paint a consistent and sobering picture of Colombia’s gas supply exposure as El Niño approaches: the country is entering the dry season with falling domestic production, record import volumes, a single regasification terminal already running near capacity, and a key gas producer in insolvency proceedings.
Juan Camilo Restrepo, a former minister in various portfolios under various governments, has warned that Colombia’s converging gas supply and electricity challenges could require the government to invoke a constitutional economic emergency — a measure last used in the 1990s to bail out the country’s struggling power companies during the Gaviria-era rationing crisis.
MinEnergy has published a draft resolution laying out measures to protect natural gas supply and electricity system reliability during the scheduled maintenance of the SPEC LNG regasification terminal in Cartagena, planned for a five-day window between July 30 and August 3, 2026.
Colombia enters its May 31 presidential first round with four polling firms pointing in the same general direction — Iván Cepeda first, Abelardo de la Espriella second, Paloma Valencia third — but diverging so sharply on margins that they imply fundamentally different results.
We found an article about hydrocarbons imports but that was only updated to February and didn’t say much about why things were the way they were. We were inspired to go back to the source data in DANE, Colombia’s statistical institute and update our trade balance chart.
Colombia’s economy is being throttled by what financial corporation Corficolombiana calls an “invisible tax” — the accumulated weight of regulatory complexity, institutional fragmentation, and administrative bottlenecks that drive up costs without appearing in any official fiscal accounting.
Six Colombian hydrocarbon industry associations — ACGGP, ACIEM, ACIPET, the ACP, CAMPETROL, and NATURGAS — jointly published a technical policy document on May 14 titled Hydrocarbons for the Development of Colombia, timed deliberately to land on the desk of whoever wins the presidential election on May 31.
With Colombia’s FDI down 16% in 2025 to US$11.5B — and 33% over four years — the May 31 first-round election has intensified scrutiny of what each leading candidate would actually mean for foreign investment.
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