The big question is whether this increased exploration effort will be rewarded with more gas. Since 1999, Pemex has stopped flaring off gas and made greater efforts to find the stuff.
Currently, Mexico is importing record amounts of natural gas to run its new gas-fired power stations. Over the past five years, proven reserves at the country's three main gasfields, Burgos, Veracruz and Macuspana, in Tabasco, have fallen. The big problem is that the Burgos gasfield in the north of the country is mature and requires more wells to maintain production.
On land. One oddity about Mexican hydrocarbons is that the country has done little to develop offshore gas. Although the flaring off of gas in the main offshore field in the Sonda de Campeche has ended, the injection of nitrogen to keep oil production levels up has made gas recovery more difficult. Petroleum engineers claim that the technique has contaminated the gas in the field. They are now advocating a nitrogen recovery plant which will enable the gas in the field to be exploited.
There is, experts say, no clear evidence that the nitrogen injection pants have actually increased the crude oil production from Cantarell, the main field in the Sonda. PEP has yet to say much about how it plans to develop the promising fields at Altamira, Lamprea and Lankahuasa.
The country also seems to have been unlucky with geology. Experts doubt that the much-touted multiple service contracts, which bring in foreign expertise, will deliver the results their proponents claim. This is different from the Texas gasfields, just the other side of the border where the reserves are denser than those at Burgos and therefore can be more easily exploited.
Imports. The country currently imports over 400m cubic feet of gas a day from Trinidad and Tobago.
End of preview - This article contains approximately 373 words.
Subscribers: Log in now to read the full article
Not a Subscriber?
Choose from one of the following options
