Colombia Gas Production Has Halved in a Decade, and Still Falls

Energy

Key Facts

—The fall. Gas output averaged 1,129 million cubic feet a day in May, down 12.89% on a year earlier, according to the engineers’ association Acipet.

—The decade. The five-month average of 1,127.6 Mpcd is 41% below the same months of 2021 and 55.5% below 2016.

—The floor. April’s 1,006 Mpcd was the lowest monthly reading in thirteen years, which makes May a rebound rather than a recovery.

—The gap. Imports covered 28.8% of national demand, approaching a third of everything the country burns.

—The bottleneck. One import terminal, Spec at Cartagena, is running, and it enters annual maintenance between late July and early August.

—The oil. Crude averaged 728,835 barrels a day, down 2.8% and the second-lowest month of the year after April.

Colombia gas production fell almost thirteen percent in the year to May, and the more useful number is the one nobody printed, which is that the country now pumps less than half the gas it did ten years ago.

Acipet, the association of Colombian petroleum engineers, published the May figures this week, drawn from the national hydrocarbons agency’s own reports. As reported by the Colombian daily La República, gas averaged one thousand one hundred and twenty-nine million cubic feet a day.

Working back from that percentage, the same month of last year produced close to thirteen hundred. The annual fall is the smaller of the two stories in the release.

What ten years did to Colombia gas production

Across the first five months of this year the country averaged about eleven hundred and twenty-eight million cubic feet a day. Over the same months of 2021 it managed more than nineteen hundred.

Go back to 2016 and the figure was above two thousand five hundred. The declines against those two years are forty-one percent and fifty-five and a half percent respectively, and both check out against the underlying numbers.

Acipet’s own framing is that these were the worst first five months for gas since 2013. The annual comparison is a symptom; the decade is the disease.

The causes are unglamorous and mostly geological. Colombia’s producing fields are old, their pressure is falling, and more water comes up with each year’s gas.

The rebound hiding inside the fall

Here is something the headline conceals. April’s output was one thousand and six million cubic feet a day, the lowest monthly reading in thirteen years.

May’s figure is therefore about twelve percent higher than April’s, on our own arithmetic from the published monthly data. Output rose, month on month, from the worst month in over a decade.

Both facts are true at once, and neither is comforting. A bounce off a thirteen-year floor is not the same thing as a recovery, and the annual trend keeps pointing down.

The one terminal, and its annual pause

Imports now cover twenty-eight point eight percent of Colombian demand, which Acipet describes as approaching a third of the country’s requirements. Every molecule of that arrives through one facility.

Spec, at Cartagena on the Caribbean coast, is the only regasification terminal operating. Two more are due to open by the end of the year, at the Pacific port of Buenaventura and at Puerto Bahía.

Neither will be running when Spec enters its annual maintenance, which Acipet places between late July and early August. The single pipe into the country narrows exactly as the dry season approaches.

This matters more in Colombia than it would elsewhere. About two-thirds of the country’s electricity comes from hydroelectric dams, and when a drought empties the reservoirs the grid burns gas instead.

The supply side has its own casualty. Canacol Energy, long the largest private gas producer, spent this year under creditor protection in a Canadian court and won permission in June to cancel nineteen supply contracts.

It supplies close to a third of the gas burned on the Caribbean coast. A producer that size stepping back from its contracts removes capacity that the import terminal was never sized to replace.

The oil is drifting too

Crude averaged seven hundred and twenty-eight thousand eight hundred and thirty-five barrels a day in May, down two point eight percent on the year. It was the second-weakest month of 2026, marginally above April.

The worst month of the past decade remains 2021, during the pandemic, when output sank to a little over seven hundred and three thousand barrels. Today’s figure is a slow slide rather than a shock.

Production is also strikingly concentrated. The department of Meta alone supplies close to fifty-nine percent of Colombian crude, with Casanare adding fourteen percent and Arauca six.

Ecopetrol, the state-controlled producer, pumped four hundred and sixty-two thousand barrels a day, well ahead of Frontera Energy and Geopark. Those are crude figures, and the company’s separate gas share is disputed between analysts.

Why does Colombia gas production keep falling?

Mainly because the fields are mature and losing pressure, a process no policy reverses quickly. Slow permitting, community disputes and a lack of new exploration contracts have compounded it, and proved gas reserves fell almost seventeen percent in a single year.

Should a foreign investor care?

Hydrocarbons still deliver roughly a tenth of government revenue and about a third of export earnings. A country importing a third of its gas at seaborne prices imports inflation with it, which is one reason the central bank has been raising rates.

What is the fix?

Two new import terminals arrive at year-end, and the offshore Sirius field is the largest gas discovery in Colombian history. Sirius is not expected to produce commercially before 2030, so the next four years must be bought rather than drilled.