Valentina Meneses
Energy Practice Co-Director
AMI
With Abelardo de la Espriella’s election as President, Colombia’s energy sector enters a reactivation window not seen in eight years. The position of the new president has been unequivocal throughout the campaign. At the ANDI’s Colombia Genera forum in March 2026, he put it this way: “We are going to fully open the door to fracking, to what it actually is — a modern and responsible technology under rigorous regulation and technical discipline, as it should be. Colombia cannot be condemned to energy backwardness because of fanaticism.” On Telemedellín he put it less formally: “Gas at any cost, full-speed fracking.”
His vice-presidential running mate, José Manuel Restrepo Abondano — an economist with a doctorate from the University of Bath, former Minister of Commerce and of Finance under Duque — detailed the how during the campaign: two decrees in the government’s first days, the first to authorize new gas and oil exploration contracts, the second to expressly allow fracking. He cited Vaca Muerta and Sheinbaum’s turn in Mexico, proposed a Colombian version of Argentina’s RIGI regime, and stated he would not keep Ricardo Roa at Ecopetrol “under any circumstances.” He also clarified the territorial limits: “It is not done in páramos, in protected areas, in the Amazon, in the Pacific; it is done in defined basins.”
The question for sector companies is not whether De la Espriella will sign those decrees.
He will.
The question is what happens after the decree, and specifically how far the signature is from the first additional barrel or first additional cubic foot of production. The honest distance between one thing and the other is one of the most underestimated data points in the public debate.
Sector companies have six weeks until the August 7 inauguration to map the scenario and position themselves. This article does not describe the campaign that just ended. It maps the path between campaign promise and effective operation on the ground, with the known traps and the less obvious ones, and the questions companies with interest in this scenario must be answering already. We take analytical positions where the debate tends to generalize.
What Can Be Done by Decree
The incoming president, as supreme administrative authority, has sufficient regulatory power to reactivate fracking without new legislation. YNC activity has never been prohibited by Congress — six filings of the prohibition bill have died between 2018 and 2025. The current regime comprises Decree 3004 of 2013, which defines unconventional reservoirs; MADS Resolution 0421 of 2014, which sets environmental terms of reference; and Decree 328 of 2020, which establishes the guidelines for the Pilot Integral Research Projects (PPII). That entire framework remains in force.
The Council of State ruling of July 7, 2022, written by Councillor José Roberto Sáchica, denied the nullity of Decree 3004 and Resolution 90341. It unified jurisprudence with an argument worth remembering: “A zero-risk policy is not viable; it falls to the regulator, not the judge, to control the risk.” With that ruling, the judicial moratorium in force since 2018 was lifted. The regulatory and judicial ground is enabled for the new government from day one.
The next level of executive instruments: instruction to ANH to sign new E&P and CEPI contracts, instruction to the Autoridad Nacional de Licencias Ambientales (ANLA, the National Environmental Licensing Authority) to process licenses, change of board and CEO of Ecopetrol, reform of the moratorium that Colombia has maintained since 2023. All of this can be done in the first 60 to 90 days after inauguration.
The nine YNC-related contracts that already exist and that will be the first to be activated: seven E&P contracts (four from a single operator specializing in coal with historical presence in Cesar-Ranchería, two from a US major, one from a Canadian operator), plus the two CEPI contracts: Kalé, which is held by Ecopetrol and Platero, which is held by a US major. The blocks total approximately 849,000 hectares with committed investments of more than US$517 million. Here is the realistic starting point of the reactivation: these are not projects to be built from scratch, they are projects on pause.
What Can’t Done by Decree
This is the part that campaign proposals tend to omit. Between the signing of the decree and effective drilling lies a path that combines environmental law, prior consultation law, administrative law, and the least predictable factor: social license.
Prior consultation
The areas with YNC potential in the Middle Magdalena Valley and in Cesar-Ranchería have the presence of ethnic communities. The Kalé pilot was suspended in April 2022 by a court in Barrancabermeja for violation of the prior consultation of the Afrowilches community. While the Administrative Tribunal of Santander reversed that decision in June of the same year, the precedent was still set.
There is no way to skip consultation.
There is no presidential decree that substitutes for the process led by the Ministry of Interior.
And prior consultation timelines on hydrocarbon projects in Colombia oscillate between 18 and 36 months when everything flows, and longer when there is parallel litigation.
Environmental license
Although the regulatory regime allows fracking, each specific project requires its own license from ANLA. Resolution 00648 of March 25, 2022 granted the license for Kalé; any new or reactivated project requires its own process. ANLA has formal timelines but also limited operational capacity and political sensitivity. A change of government changes the tone, not the process.
Environmental litigation
The 2022 ruling unified jurisprudence in favor of the regime, but did not immunize the sector against class actions, territorial tutelas, and new appeals. Ruling C-035 of 2016 declared unconstitutional the clauses that allowed continuity in páramos, and SU-095 of 2018 closed the door to municipal popular consultations as a veto mechanism. But judicial tools against specific projects —not against the general regime— remain available to those who oppose, and they will be used from day one.
Social license on the ground
Puerto Wilches is the reference case. The mobilizations against the pilots led Ecopetrol — then headed by Felipe Bayón — to request in September 2022 the suspension of Kalé and Platero for 90 days, and eventually to abandon the plans in 2023. Bayón put it this way: “We hit the brakes on unconventionals. We are undoing what we had advanced.” That exit was not by presidential decree: it was by the operator’s evaluation of operational and reputational risk.
Here is our first clear position: Puerto Wilches is not an unfortunate anecdote; it is the script that will repeat itself. Any project in the Middle Magdalena area faces a local infrastructure of organized opposition, with national and international support from environmental NGOs, sophisticated litigation capacity, and proven operational experience. The change of government facilitates regulatory re-entry but does not eliminate territorial opposition. The actors who mobilized in 2022 are still there, have gained experience, and come better prepared for the second round. Any operator that assumes “this time will be different because there is another president” has not read the case.
The Real Appetite of Operators: the Variable That Defines the Pace
There is an implicit assumption in the opening narrative: that if the State opens, companies enter. The recent evidence suggests that assumption deserves to be directly challenged.
A European major with historical presence in Colombian offshore sold its stake in what the press identified as “the discovery of the decade” and left the country in 2024.
Ecopetrol abandoned its fracking plans in 2023 without any decree requiring it.
There are 170 E&P contracts in force as of April 30, 2026. According to sector analysis, “there is no greater interest from companies in taking on these contracts with a much higher geological risk perspective.”
Meaning: Operators have been voting with their feet for years.
Here is our second clear position: The sector’s trade associations — ACP, Naturgas, Campetrol, ACIPET and the other organizations that signed the joint document “Hydrocarbons for Colombia’s Development” in May 2026 — are making a selective reading of the problem. The associations’ narrative places all the cause of stagnation on the public policy side. That reading is partially correct and largely insufficient. There is a second factor that weighs at least as much: the individual calculation of operators, which includes not only the current regime but the expected political cycle, comparative cost of capital, weight of ESG commitments, availability of better opportunities in other markets, and accumulated experience in Colombia with social license, judicialization, and regulatory rotation.
The international operator that evaluated entering Colombia in 2018, tried it in 2019-2022, and saw the regulatory pendulum swing twice in less than six years, is not the same operator that will now read a decree and send rigs. They will read the decree, evaluate political sustainability, model the 2030 scenario with a possible change of government, and discount the investment calculation by country risk.
The probability that a YNC project in Colombia recovers capital before a new electoral cycle is already difficult; with a four-year presidential term and investment cycles requiring between 8 and 15 years to break even, the rational operator will ask either for structural guarantees — which require legislation, not decree — or for a significant price discount. The new government will receive those demands in the first months.
Former Minister Diego Mesa warned that prohibiting fracking would generate “complex litigation before international tribunals,” implicitly recognizing that existing contracts have legal value. But that same logic works in reverse: the international operator evaluating entry reads not only the current government but the cycle. Vaca Muerta has a break-even of around US$40-50 per barrel; the Colombian basins with proven potential are less explored and development costs are higher, at least initially.
This brings us to our third position: the analogy with Vaca Muerta — recurrent in Restrepo’s discourse — is illusory. Vaca Muerta worked because of a specific combination that Colombia cannot replicate: a single basin with massive geological certainty (not eight with two advanced), a national operator (YPF) that subsidized early development with state backing, a cross-cutting political coalition that survived multiple government changes —Macri, Fernández, Milei — without altering the structural regime, and an already-trained workforce. The Real Instituto Elcano, in November 2025 analysis, was explicit: Vaca Muerta is “more an exception than a reference point.” Citing Vaca Muerta as inspiration is legitimate rhetorically; taking it as a replicable roadmap is an analytical error the new government would do well to avoid.
The Ecopetrol Factor
Restrepo was clear during the campaign: immediate change of board and management. The operational question is what Ecopetrol results from that change. The company closed 2025 with profits of 9 trillion pesos, 39.5% below 2024 and the worst result since the pandemic. Before the Petro government, in 2022, the figure had been close to 33 trillion. The De la Espriella narrative is to “recover Ecopetrol,” double production to 1.3 million barrels per day, and produce an estimated 15 to 20 trillion pesos in additional royalties.
Executing that narrative implies specific and difficult decisions:
- Is the Permian operation maintained or is the portfolio concentrated in Colombia?
- Is offshore exploration reactivated with partners or is onshore conventional prioritized?
- What is the relationship with Petrobras on Sirius, which is a key asset regardless of the government’s political color?
- What happens to the transition investments the company has been making?
- How is a company with a strong union and a complex public narrative restructured in the first 18 months without generating operational strikes?
USO decided not to support Cepeda in May 2026, defending the traditional business as 86% of revenues. That can be read as a window of opportunity for the new government, but the relationship between any government and a union with USO’s historical strength requires construction — it is not a blank check. The process of “recovering Ecopetrol” passes through a labor negotiation that will have to occur in the first 100 days.
Congress: The Variable That Defines the Horizon
The Congress that will be sworn in on July 20, 2026 will be decisive in two distinct senses for the new government.
First, to sustain the reactivation. Administrative measures are reversible by the next government. To give legal stability to the opening (and particularly to implement a Colombian version of Argentina’s RIGI that offers stable tax incentives to investment) legislation from Congress is needed. Without legislation, the large investor reads the horizon as four years, not the 15 to 20 that a YNC project requires to recover capital. This is the real political bottleneck of the new government—and almost no one is naming it.
Second, to defend the opening. A seventh filing of the fracking prohibition bill is virtually certain. The six previous filings have failed in the Comisión Quinta (Fifth Committee) of the House of Representatives, where the bill has died for lack of agenda. The composition of the new Congress’s Comisión Quinta is the critical variable, and it is information that will be known only after July 20.
Here is our fourth position: the public debate is reading the new government as if the presidency were sufficient. It is not. Without favorable majorities in Comisión Quinta and without a framework law that provides stability, what is built by decree gets dismantled by decree. The real question that companies with interest in long-horizon projects must ask is not “what does De la Espriella do?” but “what Congress is left?”
ESG and Financing: the Least Visible Constraint
There is a structural factor that has changed since the last great wave of oil investment in Colombia, and that the campaign debate did not mention. International commercial banks with presence in Latin America have public ESG commitments that limit financing to unconventional fossil fuel projects. Multilateral banks have formal restrictions. ESG-mandated investment funds — which are the majority of large institutional funds today — cannot finance greenfield YNC.
This does not mean there is no capital available. It means that available capital comes from a narrower set, with higher costs and more demanding conditions than ten years ago. For mid-size individual projects, the operator ends up financing with own capital or debt from regional banks that are less demanding but more expensive. For large projects requiring international syndicated financing, structuring is materially more complex.
This will surprise players in the Colombian sector that are accustomed to simpler financing structures. The internal regime may be favorable; the external regime may not be. The new government will have to articulate a strategy for relations with international banks and multilaterals that goes beyond domestic enthusiasm for the opening.
Mapping the Players: Who Enters, Who Accelerates, Who Waits
Operators with active YNC contracts will be the first in the opportunity quadrant. The contracts are signed and the investments are committed. The operational question is social license and prior consultation, not regulatory license. Three of the operators with E&P contracts are international majors with technical and financial capacity to reactivate quickly; one has a more local profile and a different trajectory. The difference between them in speed of response is not minor.
International operators evaluating entry will be the ones who best read the political cycle and who most value stability. What they will ask to enter seriously will be a package that goes beyond the decree: stable contracts, defined fiscal regime, state accompaniment in prior consultation and social license, framework law with Congressional backing. The negotiation between international operators and the new government in the first 100 days will be one of the most defining dynamics of the four-year term.
International oilfield services companies have been on standby or reduced operation for years. Reactivation means reactivating installed capacity that has been migrating to other markets. Speed of response depends on how credible the opening looks not only by decree but by projects actually under construction. The local chain grouped in Campetrol is better positioned to reactivate quickly.
Midstream and gas sector will have a different scenario. If unconventional gas effectively enters, the import logic moderates. But that entry takes years. Meanwhile, import infrastructure remains necessary. The sector needs to plan for both scenarios simultaneously.
Trade associations will move from opposition to interlocution, but also from demand to co-responsibility. They may be asked to defend what they ask for while facing divided public opinion.
Renewables sector should not a natural enemy of the new government. Restrepo proposed “diversification of the energy matrix” and included renewables, hydro, thermal, and nuclear SMR. The question is pace and capital priority. The long-term auction launched by the outgoing government would be executed before the change, but contracts begin in 2030 —already in the incoming term.
Gas-intensive industrial sector could have a favorable scenario in the medium term if unconventional gas enters. Meanwhile, the same hedging decisions as in any scenario.
Financial investors and multilaterals will be where the scenario becomes most complex. The opening narrative is attractive for part of the capital, but ESG and multilateral financiers have mandates that move in the opposite direction. The financial structuring of YNC projects in Colombia under the new government will be more demanding, not less.
Questions Companies Have Six Weeks to Answer
Until August 7, the new government team is forming the cabinet, defining priorities for the first 100 days, and receiving private sector interlocutors. This is the moment of greatest permeability. The questions that matter:
- What is the social license strategy for projects in Puerto Wilches and the Middle Magdalena basin? Who are the stakeholders that must be brought to the table before — not after — announcing reactivation?
- What is the realistic calendar between decree signing, new environmental license issuance, completion of prior consultation, and first well drilled? International experiences suggest ranges; Colombian reality has shown that optimistic ranges do not hold.
- For international operators: what package of guarantees — fiscal, regulatory, contractual — makes the calculation viable on a 15 to 20-year horizon with a 4-year political cycle?
- For oilfield services: how to size installed capacity for a reactivation that may be real or may be partial, without overcommitting and without losing position?
- What is the probable composition of the Comisión Quinta of the House post July 20, and what signals are needed from the Executive for Congress to move in the direction the sector needs?
- For Ecopetrol and its counterparts: what board is politically viable, what is the profile of the CEO who replaces Roa, and how does that change the relationship with international partners?
- What is the strategy on environmental and prior consultation litigation, in a scenario where judicialization is virtually certain even under a favorable regime?
- How to structure long-horizon project financing in an international banking ecosystem with growing ESG restrictions?
Closing
The promise of “full-speed fracking” during the campaign was relatively simple to make. Converting it into barrels effectively produced in 2027, 2028, and 2029 is a process that requires simultaneously navigating regulation, prior consultation, social license, ANLA’s operational capacity, the judicial calendar, investment appetite, international financing restrictions, and a divided public opinion. The decree is the beginning, not the end. Any reading of the new government that assumes the presidency solves the operational problem is not reading the sector; it is reading the discourse.
For companies, this means the change of government does not translate automatically into operation. It translates into a window of opportunity that requires precise execution, with timing, sequence, and well-managed stakeholders. The companies that best read the 2018-2022 scenario with the Expert Commission and the PPII pilots, and those that best executed prior consultation on complex projects, are the ones best positioned now. Those who assume the decree solves the operational problem will learn, again, that it does not. The first six weeks until August 7, and the first 100 days after, are the period in which business posture for the four-year term is defined.
Contact us if your company needs help during this transition, whether it involves a political promise that becomes an operational project, a regulatory license that doesn’t equal social license, or when business success depends on anticipating the next step of the State, the territory, and the competitor.
If your organization is mapping how to position itself for the window that opens on August 7, let’s talk.
This article is based exclusively on documented public declarations during the presidential campaign, formally filed bills, jurisprudence of the Council of State and the Constitutional Court, official data from the ANH, MME, MADS, ANLA, and Ecopetrol, and statements in reference media (Bloomberg Línea, Telemedellín, Portafolio, El Tiempo, El Espectador, Infobae, La Silla Vacía, Real Instituto Elcano, Fundación Heinrich Böll). The marked analytical positions are the authors’ editorial judgment.
Keep up to date with our Energy insights
