Colombia has spectacular landscapes, spectacular people and of course … spectacular geology!
Since I first went to Colombia almost 10 years ago, I was impressed with its abundance of … well,… almost everything. But one of the abundances it doesn’t have so much of anymore (and it is getting less abundant each year) is natural gas.
Well, I should qualify: Colombia doesn’t have an abundance of conventional natural gas.
Colombia does have an abundance of coal and some of that coal is gassy. However, much of the coal mined has not been assessed for gas content which leads to another kind of less desirable abundance: mine fatalities.
De-gassing ahead of mining is seen by the Colombian government to provide several benefits, not the least of which is to decrease mine explosions (and thus fatalities) but also to address greenhouse gas emission (the Colombian government are signees to the 2015 Paris Agreements) as well as providing economic and energy security through access to indigenous energy resources.
But, as noted earlier, Colombia has spectacular geology which means it can be complex. Thus, assessing how gas is held and predicting its occurrence in the mining of seams is not straightforward. Economic extraction of the methane is also not straightforward and will need significant exploration in order to understand how the gas is distributed and how to extract it.
Coal bearing areas in Colombia (see paper for explanation).
Although there has certainly been some excellent work on defining how gas occurs in Colombia’s coal, the studies are detailed but small in location extent, as is necessary at this stage.
This new paper*, published in the International Journal of Coal Geology and spearheaded by Prof Jorge Eliecer Mariño-Martinez of the Universidad Pedagógica y Tecnológica de Colombia with support from Juan Sebastian Gomez-Neita and myself, reviews what has been done in Colombia on understanding how gas occurs in coal.
More work is needed, of course, but the studies noted in the paper, and this paper itself, will provide an excellent foundation for future work.
In these turbulent times, it is important for all countries have energy security and that security will come with assessment and exploration underpinned by support from government, industry and academia.
* Mariño-Martinez, J.E., Moore, T.A., Gomez-Neita, J.S., 2026. Coal bed gas in Colombia: Current status. International Journal of Coal Geology 316, 104945, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.coal.2026.104945.
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