Obrador

After more than a decade of trying, and five months on from a resounding election victory, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was scheduled to be sworn into office in Mexico Saturday (Dec. 1), while turnover of the country’s top energy positions continues.

Mexico’s economy grew 3.6% year-on-year in the third quarter on the back of broad-based growth, including in the industrial sector. The forecast for the year remains steady at 2.1%, according to the Federal Reserve Board of Dallas.

The scrapping of a $13 billion airport by Mexico’s next president through a hastily organized referendum in which less than 1% of the population voted is sending shivers through the spines of stakeholders in the country’s recently liberalized energy sector, with one expert calling it the “canary in the coal mine.”

Mexican President-Elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said last Wednesday he will suspend oil and gas bid rounds until the 107 contracts awarded through rounds under the current government begin producing.

Mexican national oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) said last Tuesday it successfully placed a 10-year, $2 billion, international bond that will be used to fulfill investment plans and refinance debt.

Mexican President-Elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador signaled late last week that his administration will honor the 107 contracts awarded so far through oil and gas bid rounds conducted under the current administration led by President Enrique Peña Nieto.

The suspension of oil and gas bid rounds by Mexico’s next government will hopefully only last a few months, according to one of President-Elect Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) top energy advisers.

Following a hearing in Singapore, Mexican-based oilfield services company Servicios Petroleros Oro Negro SAPI de CV has been cleared to negotiate with creditors a year after it sought the protection of the law under a bankruptcy procedure, known as concurso mercantil, similar to Chapter 11 in the United States.

Business leaders in Mexico’s northern Gulf state of Tamaulipas fear that a potential ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) used in unconventional oil and natural gas drilling could doom their economically depressed region to a future of more poverty and crime.