Colombia's Energy Reset: What the Next Four Years Must Deliver
Colombia ends the 2022 to 2026 period as a country that produces crude oil and imports gas. That sentence would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Today it is the measurable outcome of an energy policy that prioritized ideology over supply security.
The numbers are unambiguous. Gas reserves fell from 2.82 trillion cubic feet in 2022 to 2.37 trillion in 2023, a 16 percent drop that left the country with only 6.1 years of self-sufficiency. Gas production hit its lowest level in recorded history in January 2026, at 683 million cubic feet per day. In the first week of June 2026, 32 percent of all gas consumed in Colombia came from imports, the highest figure in the country's history. A country that exported energy for decades is now structurally dependent on foreign supply, running its only regasification terminal near full capacity, with no backup infrastructure in place.
The cost of this was not abstract. A joint study by Promigas and Fedesarrollo calculated the cost of halting hydrocarbon exploration at 114 trillion pesos. Industry experts have noted that the cheap domestic gas Colombia enjoyed for decades, priced at four to five dollars per unit, has been consumed without replacement. The imported alternative now costs 60 to 70 percent more. That premium is being paid by households, industries, and the generators that keep the lights on during droughts.
The moratorium on new exploration contracts did not accelerate the energy transition. It accelerated the vulnerability. Renewable energy projects fell far short of their targets. In 2026, only 6.5 percent of the 4,475 megawatts expected from new projects had entered the system by April. Colombia's energy transition index dropped from 29th to 39th globally during the same period. The gap between political ambition and operational reality defined the four years.
What the new government has committed to change
President-elect Abelardo de la Espriella, has committed to a clear reorientation: reactivating exploration and production of oil and gas with legal certainty, restoring energy sovereignty and gas self-sufficiency, and incorporating renewables in a technically grounded and balanced way. The direction is the right one. The constraint is time.
New exploration contracts take years to produce first oil. The gas deficit projected at 39 percent of national demand in 2026 will not wait. The incoming El Nino event, which carries a probability above 90 percent of consolidating in the second half of 2026, will test a system that already has almost no margin.
This is where the upstream agenda alone is insufficient. Colombia does not only need to find more hydrocarbons. It needs to extract more value from the hydrocarbons it already produces. The country has exported crude as a raw commodity for over a century while remote regions paid some of the highest energy costs on the continent. Colombia refines most of its oil at a single facility. Regions sitting on top of producing fields buy diesel trucked in from hundreds of kilometers away. The Non-Interconnected Zones that depend on thermal generation powered by that diesel pay the price of this gap every day.
Modular crude processing offers the new government a tool that can move faster than exploration. A facility that converts crude or condensate at or near the point of production into refined fuel products can be operational in 90 days. It does not require new pipelines or centralized infrastructure. It turns the raw material that currently leaves Colombia as a commodity into the fuel that Colombian industry, agriculture, and remote communities need at the source.
Recovering four lost years in the upstream will take the full term of the new government and beyond. Recovering the value Colombia leaves on the table in the downstream can begin immediately.
If your operation is positioned in a producing region and ready to act on that opportunity, Think Energy can show you exactly what on-site processing would look like for your specific situation. Reach out at gothinkenergy.com.
