Editor’s Note: NGI’s Mexico Gas Price Index, a leader tracking Mexico natural gas market reform, is offering the following column by Eduardo Prud’homme as part of a regular series on understanding this process.

The drama of the Lakach offshore natural gas field serves to underline the difficulties Mexico faces as it tries to develop its domestic resources and depend less on U.S. imports to meet demand.

Located about 55 miles off the coast of Veracruz, near the port of Coatzacoalcos, the Lakach deepwater field has 580 Bcf of proven natural gas reserves, according to the Comisión Nacional de Hidrocarburos (CNH). First discovered at the end of 2006, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) with the help of foreign contractors quickly set to drilling what was then the deepest well in...