Colombia Relies More on LNG Imports as Gas Output Slides

Colombia keeps turning to imported liquefied natural gas as its own gas production shrinks, and an expected strong El Nino drought could drive gas-fired power demand higher this winter.

Marketed gas production averaged 1.07 billion cubic feet per day in 2022, slid to 772 million per day by 2025, and sank further to 673 million per day across January through August of this year.

The mature fields that dominate national output, among them Cusiana, Cupiagua, Pauto Sur and the offshore Guajira fields, have been in decline since 2022 with no large replacement discoveries brought onstream.

Proved reserves dropped 39 percent over the same window, down to 1.7 trillion cubic feet by 2025, according to the National Hydrocarbons Agency.

Imports have grown to fill the gap, and July 2026 set a record when LNG covered 31 percent of the gas supplied to the Colombian market, based on BEC market data.

Yet the country still operates just a single import terminal, SPEC LNG, which sits on the Caribbean coastline close to Cartagena.

Promigas says expansion work there should be online in 2026, possibly by the end of this month.

A second project, the Buenaventura LNG terminal, is aiming to start up by November 2026, and the Puerto Bahia and Ballenas terminals could follow next year.

On June 11 NOAA confirmed an El Nino had formed in the tropical Pacific, and by October the agency's Climate Prediction Center had issued an El Nino Advisory putting the odds of a strong to very-strong event into early 2027 at better than 83 percent.

Hydropower generated 81 percent of national electricity in 2025, but its share had slipped to 66 percent by July 2026, with coal and gas each carrying 12 percent.

For engineers and procurement teams watching Colombian gas infrastructure, these figures describe a country adding regasification capacity faster than production, which shifts commercial pressure onto the import side of the chain.

SPEC LNG has carried the national import duty alone, so its expansion, the Buenaventura startup and the terminals queued behind it represent several sendout hubs arriving within roughly a year, each bringing jetty topsides, vaporizers, sendout pumps and control valves into commissioning on a compressed schedule.

Peak-shaving behavior matters here, because LNG covering nearly a third of monthly supply is not a steady baseload stream, it is weather-driven swing demand that arrives in surges, and terminal equipment must handle wide, fast sendout ramps without tripping.

That duty profile stresses control valves, emergency shutdown systems and boil-off gas handling far more than steady baseload regasification does, and it rewards operators who keep spare capacity in vaporizer trains and sendout metering.

If the strong El Nino materializes as NOAA projects, gas-fired generation could climb back toward the 22 percent share seen in March 2024, and every increment of that swing must pass through whichever terminals are online, which makes the 2026 commissioning calendar the most important variable in Colombian gas security over the next two winters.