Ecopetrol Brand Guidelines: A Green Iguana & the 1951 De Mares Reversion

A concession that came back to the state.

Ecopetrol grew out of an oil concession. The De Mares concession, awarded by President Rafael Reyes to the Tropical Oil Company, began producing in 1921 with the Infantas 2 well and went on to develop the La Cira-Infantas field in the Middle Magdalena valley, south of Barrancabermeja, according to English and Spanish Wikipedia.

The legal basis came first. Law 165, signed on 27 December 1948, provided for the creation of the Empresa Colombiana de Petróleos, Spanish Wikipedia says, and the company was officially created on 25 August 1951, when the De Mares concession reverted to the Colombian state and its assets passed to the new company. Spanish Wikipedia adds that oil workers’ unions had campaigned for the concession’s reversion in the years before 1948.

From the start Ecopetrol worked across the oil chain as a state industrial and commercial company that also administered the country’s hydrocarbon resources, and it grew as other concessions reverted, English Wikipedia says. It took direct control of the Barrancabermeja refinery in 1961 and in 1974 bought the Cartagena refinery, built by Intercol in 1956. In 1970 it adopted its first by-laws, confirming its status as a state commercial and industrial company linked to the Ministry of Mines and Energy. Spanish Wikipedia counts 28 company presidents since the founding in 1951.

English Wikipedia also notes that Ecopetrol should not be confused with the earlier Colombian Petroleum Company, a US-owned concern dating from the 1930s that the state company took over in the 1970s.

Caño Limón, Cusiana and a company remade in 2003.

Large discoveries shaped the company’s middle decades. English Wikipedia says the giant Caño Limón field was announced in September 1983 by Ecopetrol in association with Oxy, and that the field allowed Colombia to resume oil exports in 1986; in the 1990s the Cusiana and Cupiagua fields in the eastern Andean foothills, operated by BP, extended the country’s self-sufficiency.

In 2003 the company was rebuilt. Decree 1760 of 26 June 2003 turned the Empresa Colombiana de Petróleos into Ecopetrol S.A., a wholly state-owned public stock company linked to the Ministry of Mines and Energy, according to English and Spanish Wikipedia. The same reform took away its role as administrator of the nation’s oil resources and gave it to a new body, the National Hydrocarbons Agency (ANH).

Opening the share register followed. English Wikipedia says Law 1118 of 27 December 2006 allowed the sale of shares, with the first offering round starting on 27 August 2007 and aimed first at Colombian individuals, pension funds, cooperatives and the company’s own workers. The law envisaged a mixed company with at least 80 percent of the shares remaining with the state, run by a shareholders’ assembly, a board and a president, and gave the oil-producing departments a seat on the board, English Wikipedia says. The shares began trading on the Bolsa de Valores de Colombia on 28 November 2007, Portafolio reported in September 2024, and on 18 September 2008 its American depositary shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker EC, English Wikipedia says. Spanish Wikipedia records a second share issue in July 2011.

Spanish Wikipedia says Ecopetrol’s logo and brand strategy were created by the brand consultancy CORPORATE, and that the visual identity is built around a green iguana, the species Iguana iguana.

National oil companies and their image.

National oil companies present themselves differently from the listed majors. Most are owned or controlled by a state, and their identities often sit close to the national story: a flag or national colours placed beside a refinery skyline, a company name that includes the country, and a founding date tied to a concession, a nationalisation or a new state. The imagery tends to repeat across the category: offshore platforms photographed at dawn, drilling rigs in desert or jungle, tanker terminals and pipelines running to the horizon.

The brand also reaches the street. Many national oil companies run fuel retail networks at home, and sometimes abroad, so the identity has to work on a petrol-station canopy, a pump, a lubricant bottle and a forecourt sign as well as on a corporate tower. That puts a premium on a simple mark and a small set of strong colours that read from a moving car.

A third strand is people and the public. Engineering academies, scholarships and graduate programmes appear prominently in their communications, alongside sponsorship of national sports teams, marathons, motor racing, museums and cultural centres. These programmes carry the company name into places far from the oilfield, and they often appear in annual reports next to production figures.

Finally, the financial documents matter more than they used to. As several national oil companies have listed shares or floated subsidiaries, their annual reports, sustainability reports and IPO prospectuses have become major brand documents in their own right, with consistent typography, photography and colour. This guide reads each company through those public materials, separating what independent dated sources document from what the company says about itself.

A power-grid stake and a creek in Santander.

Ecopetrol has widened beyond oil. On 20 August 2021 it completed the purchase of a 51.4% stake in the power-transmission company Interconexión Eléctrica (ISA), previously held by the Ministry of Finance, creating what Spanish Wikipedia describes as an energy group with a strong presence across the Americas. English Wikipedia says the company also operates in the US Gulf of Mexico from Houston, in Mexican waters and offshore Brazil, with an office in Rio de Janeiro.

The company’s environmental record includes a spill near Barrancabermeja. On 2 March 2018 oil escaped from the Lizama 158 well area into the La Lizama creek; the national environmental licensing authority, ANLA, opened sanction proceedings, stating that the company had not activated its contingency plan in line with the scale of the event and had reported the situation as controlled on 3 March. On 1 August 2021 Radio Nacional de Colombia reported that, according to the Attorney General’s Office, Ecopetrol had accepted responsibility for the environmental damage from about 550 barrels of oil and had agreed to an environmental recovery plan and to compensate affected fishers and traders.

Today Ecopetrol’s website gives its headquarters as Bogotá. Portafolio described it in 2024 as the state oil company, with shares trading in Bogotá and New York. The website presents the Ecopetrol Business Group, its companies and a “Strategy 2040,” alongside an innovation and technology centre; those descriptions are the company’s own.

For a design guide, Ecopetrol shows how a state oil company can build its identity around a native animal rather than industrial imagery. Compare Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, and Petronas, another national oil company with a green identity. For this guide we use an iguana green, a muted gold and an off-white with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Ecopetrol’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.