Touted Energy “Reform” Goes Awry in Mexico
Dream of cheaper energy in an open market turns into nightmare.
Four years ago, Mexico’s government passed a sweeping energy reform aimed at opening up Mexico’s long-protected oil and gas sectors to global competition and expertise for the first time in over 70 years. The reforms would lead to lower energy prices for domestic consumers as well as thrust Mexico into a more prominent position in the global hydrocarbons market, the government confidently predicted.
Instead, the opposite has happened: prices of gas, diesel and natural gas have soared while Mexico’s heavily indebted state-owned energy giant, Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, got tangled up in the oil bust, lost $9 billion in 2016, received a bail-out, and after making money in Q1 and Q2 of 2017, lost another $5.5 billion in Q3 2017. In other words, it has been tough on Pemex.
Production at Pemex dropped 9.5% in 2017 to 1.94 million barrels per day, its lowest level since 1980. At the same time 71.6% of the gasoline used by Mexicans last year was imported. It’s a humbling statistic for a country that not so long ago boasted the world’s second biggest oil field by production, the Canterfell.
On average, 570,600 barrels per day were bought from abroad in 2017, 60% more than in 2013. Much of it came from the US. As for Diesel, 237,500 of the 317,600 barrels sold each day came from another country — an import rate of 75% — while an average of 67% of the 2,623 million cubic feet of natural gas sold per day was imported from abroad.
Mexico’s growing reliance on energy imports could make it even more difficult for the Bank of Mexico (or Banxico for short) to bring down inflation, which reached an annual rate of 6.8% in December, almost four percentage points above Banxico’s target rate.
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