Petrobras’ Copoazu discovery offshore Colombia, revealed last week, marks a meaningful, though incremental, step in advancing a nascent deepwater gas play in the Lower Magdalena Basin. While early results from the well in the GUA-OFF-0 Block – operated by the Brazilian state player alongside partner and local peer Ecopetrol – indicate gas across multiple targets, key metrics such as reservoir quality and recoverable volume remain unconfirmed. As a result, the find is best viewed as additive to the Sirius complex – discovered by the same partnership in 2022 – than transformative on its own. Even so, the new discovery strengthens confidence in fairway continuity and supports a shift towards more systematic, multi-well appraisal, suggesting hydrocarbons are not confined to a single structure. Although not material in isolation, the discovery could help ease Colombia’s supply-demand imbalance over time if further appraisal and development prove.
Gas-prone fairway
The Copoazu-1 exploration well, drilled in Colombia’s offshore Caribbean, is in approximately 964 meters of water depth and lies close to the Sirius 1 and 2 discoveries, targeting the same gas-prone fairway. Petrobras operates the license on 44.44% and is joined by Ecopetrol on 55.56%. Preliminary results from wireline logging and fluid sampling indicate the presence of natural gas across multiple intervals, suggesting a stacked reservoir system. However, the absence of confirmed figures on net pay, porosity, permeability, and recoverable volumes means that the commercial significance of the discovery is yet to be established. At this stage, it is best interpreted as further evidence of a working petroleum system with multi-layer potential.
Copoazu-1 appears to form part of a broader, multi-well exploration and appraisal effort rather than an isolated test. The sequence of Sirius-1, Sirius-2 and Copoazu-1 suggests a gradual shift toward delineating the extent of the play. The accumulation of discoveries across the Sirius–Copoazu trend is encouraging and comes as Colombia faces a tightening gas balance, with around 9 billion cubic meters per annum of production declining and liquefied natural gas (LNG) imports rising.
The production outlook highlights a clear structural shift in supply dynamics, with future growth increasingly driven by offshore developments. While total output trends downward over the long term due to declining onshore volumes, offshore production rises steadily and becomes the dominant contributor to incremental supply post-2030. Importantly, a significant share of this offshore upside is contingent on yet-to-be-approved developments such as the Sirius project, underscoring both the opportunity and execution risk embedded in the outlook. As such, offshore projects will be central to stabilizing production and partially offsetting structural onshore decline.
The increased reliance on LNG imports is already having effects on Colombia’s domestic prices. LNG was used only to cover peak demand but is now operating on a continuous basis, which has elevated both in coast and inland domestic prices in the past three years. The figure below shows how inland primary market gas prices have consistently surpassed $10 per million British thermal units (MMBtu) since 2025, while they used to fluctuate below the $5 mark. Colombia’s regasification infrastructure is limited, with only SPEC LNG being directly connected to the gas pipeline network, contributing 12.7 million cubic meters of capacity. New regasification projects are planned and will contribute to the country’s energy security. Furthermore, the Colombian government announced a combined plan to repair the Antonio Ricaurte gas pipeline, which connects the country to Venezuela. The pipeline has been inactive for years, and this could be another way to secure gas supply to Colombia while domestic legacy production declines.
Road to potential development
Against this backdrop, Sirius–Copoazu could become a meaningful domestic supply source over time, but not without further discoveries and sustained development progress. Future activity is likely to include step-out wells, further appraisal and testing of adjacent prospects, with the objective of reducing subsurface uncertainty and assessing whether sufficient volumes can be aggregated to support commercial development. This shift toward programmatic drilling is critical in deepwater settings, where commercial viability depends not on single discoveries but on the aggregation of sufficient volumes to support infrastructure-led development.
Boost for Colombia’s offshore
By confirming the presence of a working petroleum system and supporting play fairway continuity, Copoazu effectively extends the emerging play fairway beyond GUA-OFF-0, upgrading the prospectivity of adjacent acreage. The clustering of multiple gas-bearing wells within a limited radius reduces key geological risks that previously defined the basin, particularly around charge, reservoir presence and trap integrity. As a result, nearby COL blocks move from high-risk frontier positions towards more targeted exploration opportunities with an improved geological chance of success. At the same time, the potential for cross-block development synergies becomes increasingly relevant, as shared infrastructure and resource aggregation could materially improve project economics in a deepwater context. Additionally, the continuous uplift in prospectivity is likely to have a tangible impact on licensing dynamics and operator strategy, opening the available area to more frequent competitive bidding and encouraging existing players to accelerate drilling commitments.
Ultimately, the extent to which offshore developments can materially shift Colombia’s supply balance will depend on the pace of appraisal, project sanctioning and infrastructure build-out. In parallel, resource aggregation across adjacent structures will be critical in determining whether sufficient scale exists to underpin a hub-based development concept.
Authors:
Palzor Shenga
Vice President, Oil and Gas Research
palzor.shenga@rystadenergy.com
Flavio Menten
Analyst, Oil and Gas Research
flavio.menten@rystadenergy.com
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