Colombia’s oil production has been falling for the last four years. It’s not just the 2014 price crash that pressured output: The country’s fields are depleting and new discoveries are hard to come by because of high production costs, security challenges, and opposition from the population. Earlier this year, Colombia’s Comptroller General warned that the country could lose its energy independence by 2021 if this state of affairs continues. What’s more, if production continues to fall, Ecopetrol will find it hard to service its refineries, which have a combined daily capacity of 420,000 barrels. Colombia’s oil and gas is difficult to extract, so Ecopetrol and foreign field operators need prices to be higher than US$50 to turn a profit. At this year’s end, daily crude oil output in the Andean nation is seen at 872,000 bpd, down from over 1 million bpd in 2013, at the peak of the […]