Colombia’s New President Vows to Rebuild Ecopetrol as Gas Reserves Hit a Record Low

Abelardo de la Espriella took the oath of office in Cali on August 7, 2026, promising to reverse a decline in Colombia’s oil and gas sector that his predecessor’s own regulator had just finished documenting in granular detail. The Agencia Nacional de Hidrocarburos (National Hydrocarbons Agency, ANH) published its 2025 Informe de Recursos y Reservas (Resources and Reserves Report, IRR) on June 23, 2026, in the final weeks of Gustavo Petro’s presidency, showing that Colombia’s proven natural gas reserves had fallen 54% since 2018, to 1,717 billion cubic feet (Bcf), with a reserves-to-production ratio of just 5.9 years. Finance Colombia examined that report in depth in a prior analysis. De la Espriella inherits those numbers, the political fallout at Colombia’s state oil company, and the task of proving his energy platform can outlast a single term.

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A Narrow Mandate for a Reversal

De la Espriella, a criminal defense attorney who had never previously held elected office, defeated Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) candidate Iván Cepeda in the June 21, 2026, runoff by fewer than 252,000 votes, 49.65% to 48.70%, according to final results certified by Colombia’s Consejo Nacional Electoral (National Electoral Council, CNE) and reported by Infobae. That margin has already defined his room to govern. His own party, Movimiento de Salvación Nacional (National Salvation Movement), holds just four of the Senate’s 103 seats, while Petro’s Pacto Histórico, now formally in opposition, remains the chamber’s single largest bloc with 26. Reopening hydrocarbon exploration is a decree away; sustaining that policy long enough for it to show up in reserve data will require coalition votes De la Espriella does not automatically command.

An Energy Pledge Built Around Ecopetrol

In his inaugural address, De la Espriella said, “Creo en la transición energética” (“I believe in the energy transition”), but insisted that “esa transición debe erigirse desde la fortaleza y no desde la debilidad, desde la autosuficiencia y no desde la dependencia” — “that transition must be built from strength, not weakness, from self-sufficiency, not dependence” — according to Semana’s coverage of the speech. He called rebuilding Ecopetrol (BVC: ECOPETROL, NYSE: EC) — which he described as the country’s most important company — “a definitive and absolute priority of my government,” saying it had been “treacherously plundered” over the prior four years, according to El Colombiano’s account. He committed to reopening hydrocarbon exploration contracts and authorizing what he called responsible, sustainable fracking under the country’s strictest technical and environmental standards, and he warned that an approaching El Niño weather pattern threatens hydroelectric generation on top of the reserves shortfall.

“That transition must be built from strength, not weakness — from self-sufficiency, not dependence.”

— President Abelardo de la Espriella, inaugural address, August 7, 2026

To carry out that policy, De la Espriella named María Nohemí Arboleda Arango to head the Ministerio de Minas y Energía (Ministry of Mines and Energy). Arboleda spent more than five years as chief executive of XM, the company that operates Colombia’s national power grid and wholesale electricity market, and holds an electrical engineering degree from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her appointment reads as a technical rather than political pick for a ministry that will decide how quickly exploration contracts and fracking permits actually move.

Ecopetrol’s Leadership Purge

Ecopetrol enters the new administration already reeling from the departure of its previous president, Ricardo Roa Barragán, who managed Petro’s 2022 presidential campaign before Petro installed him atop Colombia’s largest company in 2023. Colombia’s Fiscalía General de la Nación (Attorney General’s Office) filed a formal accusation against Roa on June 9, 2026, for tráfico de influencias (influence peddling), alleging he bought a Bogotá penthouse at a favorable price from a company tied to oil and gas investor Serafino Iacono, according to Infobae. In the same case, prosecutors separately allege Roa directed Ecopetrol to favor a company owned by retired police colonel Juan Guillermo Mancera with contracts, after that company made payments benefiting Roa’s circle between March 2023 and February 2024. On August 12, prosecutors filed a second accusation, alleging Roa’s 2022 campaign spending exceeded legal caps by roughly $1.66 billion COP combined across both election rounds, El Heraldo reported. Roa has pleaded not guilty in both cases. “I have already declared myself innocent … in both cases I am under investigation for,” he told Noticias RCN on July 17, according to Infobae’s account of his remarks.

Roa left the presidency of Ecopetrol for good on July 30, 2026, days after briefly returning from leave, in a reshuffle that also removed board member and former board chair Ángela María Robledo Gómez, board member Tatiana Roa Avendaño, and vice presidents Bayron Triana and Victoria Irene Sepúlveda Ballesteros, El Tiempo reported. Juan Carlos Hurtado Parra became acting president; Luis Felipe Henao Cardona became the new board chair. The reshuffle leaves Ecopetrol’s next permanent president to reverse the exploration slowdown while Roa’s criminal cases move through Colombian courts.

Production Keeps Falling

The reshuffle arrived alongside more evidence of the sector’s slide. Colombia’s average oil output fell to 724,910 barrels per day in April 2026, the lowest monthly average so far this year, though still 1.5% above April 2025’s level, according to La República’s reporting on ANH data. Commercialized natural gas output fell more sharply, down 14.2% year-over-year to 694 million cubic feet per day, according to ANH figures reported by El Tiempo. Colombian regulators separately track a broader “fiscalized” production measure that fell even further over the same period — a reminder that the specific gas metric cited changes the size of the number, though not the direction.

Fracking Is Not Actually Banned

De la Espriella has made authorizing fracking a central plank of his energy reversal, but Colombia has no statute prohibiting it. A regulatory framework dating to 2013 and 2014, expanded in 2020 to allow pilot research projects, survived a challenge at the Consejo de Estado (Council of State) in 2022. What actually halted fracking activity was a narrower ruling: Colombia’s Corte Constitucional (Constitutional Court) found in a 2023 decision that regulators had violated the consulta previa (prior consultation) rights of an Afro-descendant community near two pilot wells in Puerto Wilches, and suspended those two projects specifically. Restarting the broader pilot program is therefore largely an executive and administrative matter — issuing new contracts and environmental licenses — rather than one requiring new legislation or a reversal by the Constitutional Court, though any expansion is likely to face the same kind of community-consultation challenges that stopped the Puerto Wilches projects, per Semana’s legal analysis.

What Investors Are Watching

The fiscal stakes are not abstract. Hydrocarbon royalties totaled $29.6 trillion COP over the 40 months between Petro’s August 2022 inauguration and the end of 2025, and the ANH projects that Colombia’s existing proven reserves are worth roughly another $36 trillion COP over their remaining life, per the same IRR 2025 report — a projection that assumes production holds at a reserves-to-production ratio the report’s own data no longer support. De la Espriella inherits a reserve base that would take a decade of sustained investment to rebuild, an LNG import terminal in Cartagena — operated by Sociedad Portuaria El Cayao and branded SPEC LNG — built to buy back gas the country stopped extracting from its own subsoil, and a state oil company that just lost its president to a criminal docket instead of a strategy document. Whether that combination changes is now a question for a president who will have to build, vote by vote, the legislative majority he was not elected with.