Colombia’s Oil Export Slide Exposes A Growing Vulnerability In The External Accounts

Key Points

1. Oil export earnings fell sharply in 2025, tightening Colombia’s flow of hard currency.
2. Output and crude export volumes weakened, not just prices, pointing to structural strain.
3. Non-oil exports improved, but not enough to fully replace the dollars fuels still bring in.

Colombia’s oil sector delivered fewer export dollars in 2025, and the numbers point to more than a temporary wobble. Between January and November, exports of oil and its derivatives totaled $11.515 billion, a 16.5% drop from the same period in 2024.

Campetrol also reported average production around 803,600 barrels a day, down 16.7% from 964,300 a day a year earlier, a fall of roughly 160,700 barrels daily.

Official trade data tell the same story in broader terms. Colombia’s fuels-and-extractive export group fell to about $17.617 billion in the first eleven months of 2025, down 17.8% year on year.

November alone was weak: fuels and extractives were about $1.421 billion, down 26.0% from November 2024. Volumes softened too.

Crude Exports Fall Yearly

In November 2025, crude exports totaled about 423,000 barrels per day, down 2.6% versus October and down 7.8% from November 2024.

Exported barrels represented roughly 57% of nationally monitored crude output that month. DANE’s volume series also shows crude shipments around 12.7 million barrels in November, down 7.6% year on year.

Destination patterns shifted. In November, the main buyers were Panama, the United States, India, Côte d’Ivoire, and Jamaica, together taking 84.8% of crude and derivatives.

The value shipped to the United States fell 64.4% year on year, India fell 5.3%, and the Netherlands dropped to zero. Panama moved the other way, up $124 million, a 69.2% jump.

What cushions the blow is that other exports improved. In November, agriculture rose 39.8% to about $1.354 billion, and manufacturing rose 11.5% to about $927 million.

Still, fuels remain central to Colombia’s hard-currency earnings, and when oil dollars fall, the trade balance and exchange-rate resilience tend to weaken.

Reuters also reported mid-2025 declines in oil output and a sharper fall in gas, even as the industry signaled higher upstream investment plans, underscoring how hard it is to lift production quickly in mature fields.

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