Brazil is strongly associated with rising oil production in Latin America, yet the region has another rising star shaping prices and industry trends: Colombia.

Over the past five years, Bogotá has had as much new crude oil production as Brazilia has done, contributing to increased non-Opec supplies. Oil output in Colombia increased by nearly 450,000 barrels a day between January 2007 and December 2011, compared with 500,000 b/d in Brazil over the same period, according to estimates by the US Department of Energy.

The surge in Colombian production is important for the global crude oil market as most other non-Opec countries struggle to increase supplies, industry executives say. Colombia is the fourth-largest oil producer in Latin America, behind Mexico, Venezuela and Brazil.

The increase in production comes after the partial privatisation of Colombia’s state-owned oil company Ecopetrol in 2007. The reforms, together with a marked improvement in security, have sparked a renewed interest in Colombia’s oil sector, with record levels of exploratory drilling in 2010.

The surge in exploration has paid off, with production rising earlier this year to 1m b/d, the highest in decades, well ahead of Ecopetrol’s target of reaching this milestone by 2015.

But boosting output further will be difficult.

After five years of strong oil production growth – and exports – Colombia appears to be approaching a natural ceiling, at least for the time being. As such, non-Opec producers would lose one key contributor to annual supply growth.

The International Energy Agency, the western countries’ oil watchdog, still expects a big increase in non-Opec supply growth this year, after growth stagnated last year. With output falling in Mexico, and Argentina and Colombia no longer delivering a strong growth, all the attention and pressure in the Latin America region is going to return to Brazil.

Petrobras, the partly state-owned Brazilian company, plans to boost the country’s oil production from 2.1m b/d in 2011 to 3.1m b/d by 2015, and a hefty 4.9m b/d by 2020. The expansion plan will cost at least $120bn – and probably more – and will develop the so-called offshore pre-salt oilfields, which would account for 40 per cent of the country’s production by the end of the decade, up from less than 2 per cent at the moment. Yet Brazil has struggled with its 2011-15 business plan and over the past three years has been able to add only 150,000 b/d in supply, less than Colombia.