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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 17^th 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 17^th, 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 7^th inauguration, president-elect Abelardo de la Espriella’s economic team completed a high-level Washington mission on July 15^th, 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.

Writing in Portafolio, Sylvia Escovar – former president of Terpel and current chair of the GeoPark board – published a pointed opinion piece framing the question of who leads Ecopetrol not as a personnel decision but as an institutional one with consequences for the entire country.

Colombia’s Ministry of Finance published a detailed diagnosis of the hydrocarbon sector’s structural deterioration in its Medium-Term Fiscal Framework that frames the depth of the challenge facing the incoming De la Espriella administration.

Outgoing Mines and Energy Minister Edwin Palma used his public response to the designation of María Nohemí Arboleda as incoming minister on July 14^th to signal what he considers the most urgent near-term briefing she needs: the scheduled maintenance of the SPEC regasification terminal in Cartagena, Colombia’s sole LNG import gateway, set for July 30^th to August 3^rd.

The four-administration comparison that Valora Analitik assembled from ANH data provides the clearest single chart of what four years of Petro energy policy cost Colombia in upstream investment momentum: not a decline, not a slowdown, but a complete stop.