LatinNews Daily - 05 November 2026

*Colombia’s government has declared the restoration of the Antonio Ricaurte gas pipeline, which previously imported natural gas from Venezuela, to be a project of “national and strategic interest”. The 225km pipeline, which was inaugurated in 2007 but has been inoperative for years, travels between Colombia’s northeastern La Guajira department and the oil and gas fields in Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. Colombia’s state oil company, Ecopetrol, said that restoring pipeline flows would bring down energy costs in Colombia by avoiding the regasification process for liquefied natural gas that is currently imported by maritime routes. The pipeline has capacity to transport up to 450m cubic feet of gas per day, although Ecopetrol said that the initial plan would be to import 50m cubic feet per day. Restoring the flow of Venezuelan gas to Colombia was also a priority of the previous Colombian government led by Gustavo Petro (2022-2026), although Ecopetrol said that “in recent years, announcements on energy cooperation did not translate into infrastructure investments, and the gas pipeline continued to deteriorate”. Ecopetrol said that the restoration of the pipeline would “comply strictly with Colombian legislation and relevant sanctions regimes” and highlighted that the resumption of operations would require a licence from the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (Ofac), which has loosened sanctions on Venezuela without fully lifting them.