The financial demands of a single community, described as “extortion” by Ecopetrol, put at risk the viability of Sirius, the offshore megaproject set to restore natural gas self-sufficiency to Colombia.
Although the discovery in the Caribbean Sea promises almost to quadruple the country’s reserves and contribute 65 percent of the current national production, the prior consultation process has become a bottleneck threatening the schedule set for first production between 2030 and 2031.
This discovery has a potential exceeding 6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, compared to Colombia’s reserves of 1.7 trillion cubic feet recorded at the end of 2025. Additionally, it could provide a production of 470 million cubic feet per day.
However, the main obstacle to harnessing all this potential lies in the environmental license to start production. To obtain it, a single prior consultation must be completed with the Taganga community, a small artisanal fishing village located very close to Santa Marta.
But the talks have not been easy. Elsa Jaimes, General Manager of Offshore and Exploration at Ecopetrol, issued a strong warning about the situation: “That community is at a level of extortion. They are asking for a lot of money,” she said, without specifying the amounts requested.
Without that formalized agreement — she warned — the permit cannot be processed before the National Environmental Licensing Authority (Anla) nor can that natural gas be extracted from the seabed. “That is the bottleneck,” emphasized Jaimes.
Along the same lines, Alcindo Moritz, president of Petrobras Colombia — operator of Sirius — stated that the initiative cannot be subject to disproportionate demands.
He commented that they cannot be “hostages of a community that wants a payment 20 times greater than other 116 communities“, and insisted that the project cannot be stopped because of one or two populations. Faced with this complicated scenario, Moritz made an urgent call to guarantee certainty about the project’s schedule .
Besides that procedure, Sirius requires an additional environmental permit to build the 117-kilometer gas pipeline that will transport the gas to the Ballena field, in La Guajira. This is added to a modification of the license held by Hocol to process the resource at these facilities.
This transport infrastructure demands a scheme of 120 prior consultations with various populations. On this front, Ecopetrol reports significant progress: it has already formally started dialogue with 97 percent of the communities certified by the National Prior Consultation Authority and 38 of them (32 percent) have successfully completed the formalization of their agreements.
“The progress achieved demonstrates the joint commitment of the communities, authorities, and participating companies to build the conditions that allow the responsible development of Sirius,” assured Ecopetrol to EL TIEMPO.
Meanwhile, the National Prior Consultation Authority is evaluating the inclusion of new communities in the negotiations in response to judicial rulings, a factor that adds pressure to the Sirius schedule.
Given this scenario, the president of Petrobras Colombia stated that certainty is the most critical factor for the project, just as the licensing for the pipeline progresses well and they are close to closing the prior consultations.
“We are doing well as we are, but communities cannot start being added, nor can any community present a demand outside the curve,” said Moritz.
For the company, it is essential to guarantee legal certainty and prevent the rules of the game from changing halfway through, since “nothing can fail” to achieve the first production of Sirius between 2030 and 2031.
Meanwhile, Elsa Jaimes clarified that neither Ecopetrol nor Petrobras seek to evade their social commitments, but rather to prevent the emergence of a new community from paralyzing the entire environmental licensing while dialogue stages are underway.
Despite the challenges, the companies aim to close the prior consultations by the end of 2026, in order to file the pipeline license application in the first quarter of 2027 and approve the project’s execution by the end of that same year.
For the sector, Sirius gas will allow displacing imports with a cleaner, more economical, and reliable resource. However, the timing leaves no room for delay: once this environmental license is obtained, engineering work to begin the production phase will take about three years.