President Gustavo Petro signed Decreto 0905 on July 30th, naming Edwin Palma – currently Minister of Mines and Energy – as ad hoc Minister of Labor and ad hoc Minister of Housing, City, and Territory, concentrating three portfolios in one official just a week before the administration’s term ends on August 7th.
Decreto 0526 de 2026 has raised alarms in Cauca after the Compañía Energética de Occidente (CEO) warned the measure will alter the Fondo de Energía Social (FOES) and could push energy bills up by as much as 30% for roughly 178,000 users starting June 1, 2027.
The situation Abelardo de la Espriella inherits on August 7th has a clear statistical signature, according to El País: crude oil production is at its lowest level in 16 years – a figure corroborated by Corficolombiana – the ANH signed zero new exploration and production contracts in four years, gas reserves collapsed to the point where Colombia now imports one third of what it consumes, and the sector has posted nine consecutive quarters of declining performance.
The first months of Abelardo de la Espriella’s government will be evaluated against five quantifiable indicators, according to economists assembled by Bloomberg Línea: financial market behavior, fiscal discipline, inflation, investment, and economic activity and confidence.
With fewer than two weeks left in his administration, President Gustavo Petro declared a national disaster for El Niño on July 23 and routed CoP$8T through the National Disaster Risk Management Unit (UNGRD).
The Comisión de Regulación de Energía y Gas (CREG) has named economist Adriana Jiménez Delgado as executive director for a 12-month term, formalized under Resolution CREG 105 015 of 2026.
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.
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