Free Republic

The proposed reform for Mexico’s energy constitution could be approved late this year or early 2014, with secondary legislation that will shape Mexico’s energy sector to be finalized in the second half of next year, according to a panel of industry experts at a recent Mayer Brown presentation in Houston on the proposed reform of Mexico’s energy sector. Should the legislative process move forward as planned, the first profit sharing contracts under the new regime would be issued for the bidding process in the second half of 2014, said Duncan Wood, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson...

Everyone is getting excited that the Mexican government may open up the nation's oil sector to foreign companies, but a dose of realism ought to temper the bullish sentiment. ... The last time this happened was several years ago. Between 2007 and 2008, then-President Felipe Calderon urged the Mexican Congress to adopt legislation that would allow state oil monopoly Pemex to offer bonuses to private companies working as contractors. The idea was that the bonuses, while not tied to oil prices or reserves, would somehow be enough to bring in foreign capital and expertise to develop Mexico's hitherto largely untouched...

Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will present an energy reform to Congress in August that proposes changing the constitution to encourage major new private investment in the oil sector, a senior lawmaker said on Wednesday. Pena Nieto favors an overhaul of country's closed energy industry to lure private capital and boost flagging oil and gas production. David Penchyna, leader of the Senate's energy committee and a member of Pena Nieto's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), said the proposal will seek to change the constitution to allow either concessions or risk-sharing contracts. "We will have President Pena's initiative in August," said Penchyna....

A pipeline explosion Sunday that injured seven people and sent flames and smoke shooting hundreds of feet into the air in central Mexico was caused by illegal tapping, Mexico’s state-owned oil company said. The pre-dawn explosion in a farm field injured four police officers and three firefighters among those called to the scene by a report of an oil leak, the state prosecutor’s office said. Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, issued a statement on its Twitter account blaming the blast on an attempt to steal oil with an illicit tap. The supply of crude oil through the pipeline was immediately suspended,...

State-owned Petroleos Mexicanos admits that "serious" corruption exists in some areas of the company and that contracting processes in particular have been plagued by "interference from organized crime," a leading Mexican daily said Friday. In a front-page story, El Universal said Pemex representatives and members of the Mexican Construction Industry Chamber drew that conclusion at a meeting in late April. Pemex executives acknowledged that corruption is fueled "by the elevated potential economic benefit of illegal acts, impunity and the spaces opened up due to unnecessary flexibility," the newspaper reported. El Universal's story was published just days after rival daily Reforma...

Mexican state-owned oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos said it detected the presence of oil at a deep-water field in the Gulf of Mexico. "There are clear signs of the presence of hydrocarbons in Maximino, but final tests are still needed to fully confirm it," Pemex announced on Twitter. It said exploration work was continuing at the field, which is located on Mexico's side of the Perdido basin in a zone very near U.S. territorial waters. Pemex has previously found crude at other deep-water fields in the Perdido area. The Mexican company added that it hopes "to have definitive results shortly on...

On March 18th Mexico celebrates the day president Lazaro Cardenas expropriated Mexico’s oil industry. Now, president Enrique Peña Nieto is getting ready to break up the State oil monopoly. Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Peña Niet’s political party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, (PRI) which controls 241 of 500 seats in the lower house voted during its national assembly to agree to, “end its opposition to constitutional changes that would ease state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos’s grip on the oil industry.” Breaking up PEMEX and opening refining, exploration and extraction of oil to foreign companies has been one of Peña Nieto’s political...

Mexico City - Rescuers searched for survivors Friday and authorities promised a thorough investigation after an office building blast killed 32 people and injured 121 at the headquarters of Mexico's state-owned oil company, Petroleos Mexicanos. The cause of the basement explosion in an administrative building next to the iconic, 51-story Pemex tower in Mexico City remained a mystery, with President Enrique Pena Nieto urging people not to speculate. Theories ranged from an electrical fire to an air conditioning problem to a possible attack.

<p>An explosion at the main headquarters of Mexico's state- owned oil company in the capital Thursday heavily damaged three floors of the building, sending hundreds into the streets and a large plume of smoke over the skyline. Local media reported that at least one person had died and about 40 were injured.</p>

More workers in Mexico have died from their wounds following a blast that set off a blaze at a gas plant, bringing the death toll to 30. Twenty-five people are still in hospital. State-run oil company Pemex says that all those who had been missing are now accounted for. Mexican President Felipe Calderon has ordered an investigation into Tuesday's blast in northern Tamaulipas state. Pemex has ruled out foul play, saying it was an "unfortunate accident". The plant sustained serious damage and could take a month to restart operations, Pemex said. In an interview with Mexican radio, Pemex executive Carlos...

'clandestine tap' Despite 130-ton pot busts and their being locked in a five year, multilateral war with the government/other gangs in which 5x more people have died than US losses for the entire Iraq war, frightening Mexican drug mafias continue to grow in wealth, power, and influence... and are now extending their unique brand of chaos directly to US soil.The Mexican federal government already had enough problems facing an utterly ruthless enemy equipped with machine guns, narco-tanks and homemade submarines attained via almost unlimited cash- now the gangs have gone on the offensive against the feds' own primary revenue source, Pemex: over thirty of the...

Most probably, on December 1st, Mr. Enrique Peña Nieto (EPN), the presidential candidate of PRI party, will become the new Mexican president for a six year term. The PRI was the dominant political party in Mexico from 1929 to 2000 although with different names. The resurgence of the PRI comes after a 12 year interregnum of the PAN, a center-right party whose merit was to evict the “hegemonic” PRI from Los Pinos, Mexico’s presidential house. The question on everyone’s minds is: Will the return of the PRI spell a reversal of energy policies pursued by PAN during the past 12...

Mexico and the United States signed an agreement on Monday to help U.S. firms and Mexican oil monopoly Pemex exploit deep water oil resources in the Gulf of Mexico that straddle the countries' maritime boundaries. The deal, negotiated last year, will lift the moratorium on oil and gas exploration and production for 1.5 million acres in the Gulf and sets up legal guidelines for companies to jointly develop any trans-boundary reservoirs.

Spagnoletti alleges that a standby ship that was in place to take the workers away in case of trouble left without them, knowing the liftboat had been crippled by the storm and the workers had already called for help. He said the standby ship was still in the area when the workers went into the water. “The vessel didn’t stand by. It just took off,” he said, adding the workers should have been evacuated ahead of the storm. Spagnoletti said the standby vessel left because its crew was getting seasick and wanted to go back to shore. The men tried...

Seven of 10 oil workers missing in the Gulf of Mexico were found alive Sunday, according to Mexico’s state oil company, three days after evacuating their disabled rig in a tropical storm and escaping in an enclosed life raft. Two bodies also were found but have yet to be identified, and rescuers are still searching for one worker who remains missing, Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, said in a statement. Pemex identified the survivors as two Americans, Jeremy Parfait and Ted Derise, Jr., both of Louisiana, Kham Nadimuzzaman of Bangladesh and Mexicans Ruben Velasquez, Eleaquin Lopez, Luis Escobar and Ruben Lopez...

Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX) is the state-owned oil company (and natural gas) of México, which since the 90’s has been discussed for privatization like many other state-owned companies in México. The policy of privatization is sometimes called liberalizing the company, however many aspects of privatization need to be taken into consideration when discussing such a lucrative portion of the federal budget for México. PEMEX has 41 divisions, and is a source of Mexican sovereignty, and any talk of privatization will not happen without a strong fight, not only from the left, but also Mexican nationalists who see it as a source...

Increasingly sophisticated thieves stole thousands of barrels per day of oil products from Mexico’s state-owned oil company in the first four months of 2011, thefts worth about $250 million, the company’s director said Thursday. Those thefts amounted to almost one million barrels in the first four months of the year, a level almost 50 percent more than what thieves stole in the same period of 2010, according to the Petroleos Mexicanos oil company, also known as Pemex. Pemex director Juan Jose Suarez Coppel said the stolen fuel was the equivalent of 100 tanker trucks per day.

Mexico, the third-largest supplier of foreign oil to the United States, could lose the capacity to export crude altogether within a decade without major new investments in exploration and production, warns a research group report released on Friday. The country’s shift from exporter to importer would deal a severe blow to Mexico’s federal government, which depends on oil sales for roughly a third of its budget, said the report, a two-year investigation by researchers with the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University in Houston. “A shift toward oil importer status would be a severe burden...

A total of 713 oil platform workers were evacuated on Tuesday when a semi-submersible residence began to collapse into the Gulf of Mexico, said state-owned oil company Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex).

Proved reserves fell 1.4% to the equivalent of 13.8 billion barrels of oil last year, the Mexico City-based company said today in a presentation on its website. After two years of delays, the state-owned company, which is spending about $23 billion this year, will open production projects to private companies to maximise output from older or closed fields, Bloomberg reported. Pemex’s crude production dropped 1% to 2.576 million barrels per day last year. Last year, Mexico’s National Hydrocarbons Commission as well as independent auditors disagreed with Pemex regarding the amount of so-called possible and probable oil-equivalent reserves at the Chicontepec...