Colombia’s Bold Push to Go Green Has an Unintended Trade Off: Gas Imports

(Bloomberg) -- A growing consequence of President Gustavo Petro’s push to wean Colombia off fossil fuels is unfolding at a sprawling natural gas import complex on the nation’s coast.

It’s there, along the Caribbean Sea near Cartagena, that tankers as long as three football fields are docking with increasing frequency to unload cargoes of liquefied gas. Colombia needs the imports because its own reserves are dwindling as Petro refuses to allow new drilling contracts.

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Liquefying and shipping fuel from the US or elsewhere, however, requires a tremendous amount of energy, creating emissions and making it worse for the Earth’s climate than gas Colombia pumps at home. Critics say Petro’s hard-line insistence on phasing out local fossil fuel production — even if it means relying on imports — is undermining his own environmental goals that have made him a global leader in the fight against climate change. 

“Colombia is giving a lesson to the world on what not to do in terms of energy transition,” Camilo Prieto, a professor of climate change and public health at Javeriana University in Bogotá, said in an interview. 

Officials in Petro’s government deny that Colombia faces a gas shortage and downplay the need for imports, even as cargoes of LNG arrive. In an interview, Mines and Energy Minister Andres Camacho said the nation has short-term solutions to ensure homes and businesses have ample fuel and, for the longer haul, has aggressive plans for solar and wind to wean the economy off fossil fuel. 

“The energy transition is about decarbonizing the economy,” Camacho said. “We want to overcome that dependency.”

The LNG flowing into Colombia is a reminder that the path from fossil fuels to clean energy is jagged. It has taken more than a century for nations to develop energy systems, and retooling them to run without oil and gas isn’t easy. 

California, for instance, has needed to call for widespread conservation and granted utilities permission to fire up diesel generators when demand for electricity spikes because the state closed so many gas plants. And in Europe, electricity prices have soared and nations have reverted to emission-heavy oil plants or inefficient gas generators when North Sea gusts ebb, smothering output from wind farms. 

Colombia, Latin America’s seventh-largest gas producer, has historically pumped enough of the fuel to meet its own needs, thanks to abundant fields in the Llanos Basinamid the nation’s northeast plains and in the Guajira Basin along its northern coast. About 70% of homes use gas for cooking, and it supplies about 20% of the nation’s electricity.

The nation’s reserves, however, have been declining for a decade. Colombia already faced looming shortages when Petro, the nation’s first leftist leader, was elected in 2022. 

Instead of pushing to find new sources of gas, the president blocked new licenses to explore for wells. Petro, who has called fighting climate change a “matter of life and death,” also killed two pilot projects that Colombia’s state oil-and-gas company had planned with Exxon Mobil Corp. to extract gas using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. Those projects could have helped bring new sources of gas online fast enough to avoid a shortfall.

Then in late 2023, at a United Nations climate conference in Dubai, Petro announced Colombia would join a small cadre of nations pledging to quit fossil fuels. It thrust him into the spotlight of the global environmental movement, making him a key figure in the campaign to abandon oil and gas. 

Until then, the countries that had endorsed the “fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty” were mostly small island nations. Not only was Colombia the largest player to join based on the size of its economy, it was also putting far more risk on the table than anyone else. 

Oil and coal account for about half of Colombia’s exports. Walking away from that revenue will require a titanic shift in the nation’s economy. The willingness to do it put Petro in a category of his own among world climate leaders.  

“The world is starting to realize that if you want to say that you’re a climate leader then you need to actually act on fossil fuel production,” Alex Rafalowicz, director of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, said in an interview. “That’s why President Petro is being welcomed as a true climate leader.”

At home in Colombia, however, concern has grown over how Petro’s strategy is impacting gas shortages and whether expensive imports will hurt Colombia’s already beleaguered economy.  

Colombia’s commodities exchange estimates the nation’s demand for gas will outstrip domestic production by 5% this year and by 17% in 2026. 

Angela Cadena, who headed the national energy and mining planning unit between 2012 and 2015, said the government is creating an unnecessary crunch that’s left factories and businesses scrambling to line up supplies of gas. “It’s obtuse not to explore in Colombia,” she said in an interview.

Officials at state-run Ecopetrol SA say they plan to avoid the need for LNG imports through steps that include powering the company’s own operations with diesel instead of gas, freeing up fuel for homes and businesses. Environmentalists and others criticize this plan, pointing out diesel emits  more carbon dioxide than gas when burned.

“Politically, they don’t want to show that Colombia has lost its self-sufficiency,” David Angel, co-founder of Bogotá consultancy Energy Transitions SAS, said in an interview. “But when you look at those decisions, they imply a higher carbon footprint — not a lower one.”

LNG shipments, meanwhile, have already started to arrive. Colombia imported a record number of cargoes last year, totaling more than 2 million metric tons. Nearly 60% of that gas came from the US, and the rest came from an LNG terminal in Trinidad and Tobago.

Most of the LNG has gone to fuel gas-fired power plants, which Colombia leaned on heavily last year as an El Niño-fueled drought hobbled output from hydro-electric dams. Then in November, a cargo arrived to supply factories and homes. A second one arrived in December.

More LNG is on its way. Colombian importer Calamari LNG is preparing to begin negotiating longer-term supply deals from the US Gulf coast or Trinidad and Tobago. 

Each LNG tanker that docks off Colombia’s shore is all-but certain to be worse for global warming than the nation’s own gas.

The amount of carbon dioxide and methane associated with each gas molecule varies by region, depending on how much energy it takes to pump it from the Earth, whether it travels through leaky pipelines and other factors. A cargo of LNG could contain a mix of gas from different basins.

Gas produced in Colombia generates roughly the same amount of emissions as gas from the US Permian Basin, according to an estimate from Welligence Energy Analytics. A second research firm, Enverus, reached the same conclusion comparing emissions associated specifically with Ecopetrol.

But liquefying that fuel from the US — which requires cooling it to -260F (-162C) — and then shipping it 1,800 miles (2,900 kilometers) to Cartagena would give it a carbon footprint that’s about 50% higher than gas from Colombia, Welligence estimates. 

Prieto, the Javeriana University professor, said if Colombia’s president wants to help his nation fight climate change, he’d be better off pushing to end rampant deforestation and expanding cattle ranches. Focusing on quitting fossil fuels, he said, is a “misguided strategy.”

Camacho rejected the idea that Petro’s decision to halt licenses to look for new gas wells had any significant impact on the nation’s fuel supplies. Exploring for wells, the minister said, doesn’t guarantee finding them.

Colombia does have deepwater gas wells in the Caribbean that were discovered under licenses issued before Petro took office. Ecopetrol says one of them has potential to triple the country’s reserves. Camacho said officials are pushing to develop it as quickly as possible. But it’s not expected to start producing significant supplies until at least 2029. 

In the meantime, the energy minister argues new solar and wind farms will provide enough energy to avoid LNG imports. Yet to make up for the gas shortfall Colombia faces this year, its solar capacity needs to double, according to BloombergNEF analyst Javier Rico. That’s unlikely to happen until the end of 2028, BNEF estimates.

The ferocious pace of climate change, however, leaves Colombia few options, Camacho said. The US and other global powerhouses had the luxury of building their economies with fossil fuels. Colombia, he said, must cut its own path. 

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