Colombia

Despite high oil prices, Colombia's economically-dependent oil industry is struggling to stage a recovery, but shale gas could give it a boost.

While there have been no major oil discoveries in Colombia for over two decades the Andean country is believed to have recoverable shale oil resources of up to 7 billion barrels and 30 trillion feet of shale gas. Even more startling is that the number of massacres reported in Colombia for that period during 2022 is the same as for the full-year 2019 and 10 more massacres than the 12 reported all of 2018. Leading candidate left-wing senator Gustavo Petro has made it clear that if he wins Colombia’s presidency, with voters going to the ballot box in May 2022, he will end coal mining and oil drilling in Colombia. Essentially, Petro plans to terminate (Spanish) the award of oil exploration licenses while allowing existing operators to continue pumping petroleum until Colombia’s reserves are exhausted. Assaults against pipelines, oilfield invasions, and wellhead attacks have, however, fallen sharply since the demobilization of the FARC in 2017, although local community opposition to the hydrocarbon sector is rising. Now an electoral year has arrived in Colombia with the first round of the presidential election to be held in May 2022 followed by a run-off vote later in the year if no candidate receives a majority of the vote. Data from Colombian independent peace thinktank Indepaz (Spanish) shows 22 massacres from (Spanish) 1 January 2022 to 11 March 2022 compared to 18 for the same period a year earlier and 12 during the first 10 weeks of 2020.