Ecopetrol’s incoming president said Colombia has oil reserves for 7.4 years and gas for 5.9 years, then used that shortage to justify a fresh push into fracking and offshore drilling. Joaquin Gutierrez Caballero, who managed President Abelardo de la Espriella’s election campaign and has no background in oil, said the company will apply what he called responsible fracking while continuing offshore exploration. The message was blunt. The company that controls a huge share of the country’s energy future says the answer to falling reserves is more extraction, not less.
Who Gets to Decide
Gutierrez Caballero said Ecopetrol would move ahead with conventional and unconventional projects. He said the company was taking charge at a moment of crisis and that there was no room for half measures. That’s the language of an apparatus that treats a national resource like a command post. The people living with the consequences don’t appear in that sentence. The managers do.
Ecopetrol pumped 705,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day between April and June, its weakest quarter in four years. That figure sits at the center of the company’s pitch: output is down, reserves are thinning, and the response from above is to squeeze harder. The hierarchy is clear. Decisions are made at the top, while the costs of extraction, pollution, and industrial risk land elsewhere.
Communities Already Said No
Ecopetrol’s two fracking pilot projects, Kale and Platero, near Puerto Wilches on the Magdalena River, were suspended in 2022 after a court order and a request from Ecopetrol itself. The Constitutional Court ruled in 2024 that the pilot projects breached community rights. That ruling matters because it shows the people most exposed to the projects were not passive spectators. They challenged the plan, and the court acknowledged that the projects crossed a line.
Still, the company is back with the same logic dressed up in cleaner language. It plans to apply what it calls responsible fracking. The phrase sounds polished. The reality is older and rougher: extract more, argue later, and call it stewardship.
The Offshore Bet and the Texas Hold
The article said Sirius, a deepwater gas find 77 kilometres off Santa Marta, holds more than six trillion cubic feet of gas, and that production is planned for the end of 2029 with about US$2.9 billion set aside for the work. That’s a long lead time and a huge pile of capital, all aimed at keeping the machine fed. The company is betting on another offshore frontier while the country’s reserves clock keeps ticking.
Ecopetrol also holds a position in the Permian Basin of Texas, where output fell to 80,800 barrels a day in the second quarter from a peak of 115,000 in 2025. President Gustavo Petro asked Ecopetrol in February 2025 to sell its American fracking assets. The request came 1 year and 7 months ago, but the company’s direction now points the other way. The previous government had blocked a much larger deal in the same basin, which the magazine put at about US$3.6 billion, and two board members resigned over that decision. Even inside the boardroom, the fight over where and how to drill has already split the people at the top.
Ecopetrol’s announcement of a second headquarters in Barranquilla, on the Caribbean coast, adds another layer of corporate sprawl to the picture. More offices. More managers. More distance from the communities that live with the fallout. The company’s incoming president says there’s no room for half measures. The people who breathe the dust, face the wells, and watch the land get carved up never get asked whether they agree.