Colombia Has Cheap Crude. It Should Stop Paying Expensive Diesel.
Brent crude fell $32 per barrel from its April 2026 peak. As of this week it is trading around $74 to $85 per barrel, and analysts at the EIA forecast it will average $74 in the third quarter. Colombia is a crude-producing country. On paper, cheaper crude should mean cheaper fuel for the industrial operators, power generators, and mining companies that run on diesel every day.
It does not. And the reason tells you everything you need to know about where the real opportunity is. The IEA's July 2026 report describes a market that is fundamentally long crude but short conversion capacity. Distillate inventories in the United States are 12 percent below their five-year seasonal average. Gasoil futures are surging while crude futures fall. Diesel crack spreads, the margin between crude input and refined product output, are at four-year highs. The market has the raw material. It cannot convert it fast enough, in the right places, to meet the demand that exists.
Colombia sits in the middle of this paradox. The country extracts crude. It ships much of it abroad at commodity price. And then its industrial operators buy diesel trucked in from distant terminals, paying a market price that reflects global refining tightness, logistics premiums, and supply chain disruptions that have nothing to do with the oil sitting beneath Colombian ground.
The gap between what crude costs today and what diesel costs today is not closing. It is widening. Every fuel delivery truck that arrives at a remote Colombian site is carrying a cost that should not exist. The crude to produce that diesel was already in the ground nearby.
Colombian operators do not have to wait for the market to fix itself
The new government has signaled a clear shift toward reactivating exploration and production. Petrobras is advancing Sirius, a $3 billion project with Ecopetrol. The upstream is moving in the right direction. But the first molecule of Sirius gas is not expected until 2030 or 2031. The upstream recovery is real and it is measured in years.
The downstream opportunity is available now and it is measured in months. Think Energy's modular processing plants convert crude oil and condensate into ultra-low-sulfur diesel at the point of production, in 90 to 120 days. No pipeline to a centralized facility. No logistics premium on delivery. No exposure to a global product market where diesel prices move independently from crude prices because conversion capacity is the binding constraint.
When crude is cheap, processing it locally costs less. The margins on on-site production improve precisely now when global diesel prices are most disconnected from crude input costs. That is the window Colombian operators are looking at right now. Crude at $74. Diesel is still priced by a market that is 12 percent below its seasonal inventory average with no clear path to restocking before year end.
The operators who act during this window will lock in the economics of on-site processing at a moment when feedstock costs are low and the alternative, purchased diesel, remains structurally expensive. The operators who wait will continue paying for the gap between cheap crude and expensive diesel that the global refining system creates and Colombia has the means to close.
Colombia has cheap crude. Think Energy converts it into fuel you control, at a cost that does not move when Goldman Sachs publishes a note on refining margins. If your operation is in Colombia and runs on purchased diesel with crude or condensate access on-site, reach out at gothinkenergy.com.
