pemex

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

Business leaders, analysts and politicians have joined a chorus of warnings that shortages of natural gas could strangle the ambitions of the Mexican administration to boost economic growth and create greater opportunities for the nation’s poor.

Natural gas production at Mexico’s state-owned oil and gas giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) fell 8.9% year/year in January to 3.696 Bcf/d.

During his regular early-morning press conference a week ago, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador finally announced a long-awaited financial package intended to reversefortunesat the national oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), which is suffering from 15 years of production decline and is $104 billion in debt.

Fitch Ratings last week lowered by two notches the long-term foreign and local-currency issuer default ratings (IDRs) for Mexican national oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) to ”BBB-’ from ”BBB+’, and downgraded Pemex’s national long-term ratings to ”AA (mex)’ from ”AAA (mex)’, with a negative rating outlook.

Natural gas marketers in Mexico transacted an average volume of 6.69 Bcf/d during the second half of 2018 (2H2018), up 35% from the 4.96 Bcf/d averaged in the year-earlier period, with December deals surging, according to the latest IPGN monthly natural gas price index published by the Comisión Reguladora de Energía (CRE).

The tender for a 600 MMcf/d floating storage and regasification unit (FSRU) in the Pajaritos port in the southern Gulf of the Mexican state of Veracruz has been called off, sources have told NGI’s Mexico GPI.

Carlos Romero Deschamps, who has led the trade union of Mexico’s indebted state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) for nearly three decades, could potentially hinder efforts to return the oil and gas producer to its glory days if swirling rumors of corruption and nepotism against him are true, analysts warn.

Mexico’s national oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) expects crude oil production growth to come mainly from well completions and workovers in 2019, according to a report by think tank Pulso Energético.