BOGOTA (Reuters) -Colombian President Gustavo Petro on Tuesday called for the sale of state oil firm Ecopetrol’s fracking operations in the United States to invest in clean energy.
The leftist leader’s request was made to his minister of mines and energy, Andres Camacho, in an unusual live broadcast of a cabinet meeting.
“I want this operation to be sold in order to invest in clean energy in Colombia, to be discussed technically, and economically,” he said. “It cannot be that we are for death and not for life.”
The meeting came a day after Ecopetrol announced an agreement to renew its oil joint venture with Occidental Petroleum in the U.S. Permian Basin in Texas.
Ecopetrol, which is majority-state owned, backed out of a separate deal last August to acquire $3.6 billion of other assets in the Permian Basin from Occidental after orders from Petro, who has made weaning the Andean country away from fossil fuels a key goal of his government.
(Reporting by Luis Jaime Acosta and Carlos Vargas; Editing by Kylie Madry)
