Colombia discovers huge gas reserve in Caribbean Sea

Colombia’s national oil company Ecopetrol and Brazilian oil giant Petrobras announced Thursday they had discovered a huge natural gas reserve off the coast of Colombia in the Caribbean Sea that could double Colombia’s reserves of this wealth.

This gas field is located off the coast of Santa Marta and was discovered in 2022.

Ecopetrol said in a post on X that the field’s gas reserves are now estimated at about 6,000 billion cubic feet of gas, thanks to the largest well discovered since the 1990s.

In turn, Rogerio Soares, general manager of exploration assets at Petrobras, said during an event in Cartagena, northern Colombia that this field has the potential to double Colombia’s reserves of natural gas.

The size of this field is close to the size of the Cochuba field in Riohacha (north), which has been supplying the country with gas for 45 years.

The announcement comes a day after the government of leftist President Gustavo Petro announced a $40 billion plan to finance the energy transition to free the country from its dependence on oil, gas and coal.

Petro, who in mid-2022 became the first leftist president in Colombia’s history, is a vocal critic of fossil fuels and wants the state-owned company Ecopetrol, the country’s largest employer with 33,000 employees, to specialize in renewable energies.

His government has suspended the awarding of new oil exploration contracts.

This policy is severely criticized by the conservative opposition and oil unions, which call for a gradual transformation without compromising economic security.

The hydrocarbon sector represents 2.8% of Colombia’s GDP, according to official figures.

Oil is one of the main export products of Latin America’s fourth-largest economy.