Former Ecopetrol head blasts Petro’s oil policy

Colombia’s President Gustavo Petro is wrong to attack the country’s oil sector when it comes to tackling climate change, according to Juan Carlos Echeverry (in photo), who served as finance minister (2010-12) and later as head of state oil company Ecopetrol (2015-17).

“To sacrifice hydrocarbons in Colombia to fight climate change looks like foolishness to me,” Echeverry said during a seminar held by Chile’s construction chamber (CChC).

Since taking office last year, Petro has halted new auctions for drilling projects and has pushed for a fracking ban.

When talking with BNamericas after his presentation, Echeverry said he was in favor of fracking.

“In a poor country like Colombia, to leave 17bn barrels of oil that supposedly are underground seems like a mistake to me. But beyond that, Colombia abandoning oil too quickly would seem like another mistake for me, because at this moment Colombia doesn’t have a substitute for its exports,” he said. 

However, Echeverry says that Colombia can develop alternative industries to oil without hurting the latter and believes that both hydrocarbons development and economic independence can coexist. 

“Colombia has to start developing other export sectors, but what oil has to do is to become more competitive, to lower costs,” he said, while also questioning the move to reduce oil production while countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia and the US keep producing.