In this section, we group our annual catalogs by presidential term, starting with Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000) and continuing to Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018-24). Reports may be purchased individually (US $50), by year (US $1,000), or by presidential term (US $2,500). For many of these reports, sample pages are available on request: info@energia-mx.com. To be redirected to our Annual Catalogs page, click here.

PEMEX'S two-billion dollar platform losses in recent years (Nohoch Alfa in 2023 and Abkatún Alfa in 2015) point to a faulty safety regime and a lack of engagement with U.S. and European safety authorities. Such accidents represent failures of leadership, procedures (recruitment, training, maintenance, supervision), regulation, and public oversight. The billion-dollar fire that consumed a Pemex platform on July 7, 2023 should be a warning. Offshore safety in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), which is shared by Cuba, Mexico and the United States, lacks coordination and a common framework for training, evaluation, and risk mitigation. Data made available to the public is misleading or non-existent. In the United States, authorities publish statistics on safety incidents in oilfield operations in federal waters, but not specifically for those in the GOM. Data on safety incidents in waters of state jurisdiction, if published at all, are not aggregated with federal data to give a comprehensive picture. On Mexico’s side, Pemex publishes data on safety incidents measured by frequency and gravity scaled to the number of hours in “at risk” operations. As the total number of such hours is not published, the reader cannot discern if the rate of safety incidents is increasing or decreasing from one reporting period to the next. Worse, Pemex’s safety data is aggregated. There is no separate reporting for offshore accidents. As for the safety performance of private operators, there seems to be no obligation to report them to the public. The hydrocarbon safety agency (ASEA), created in 2014, has a minuscule budget and staff. It has earned the nickname “PowerPoint Safety Agency.” In Houston, the Center for Offshore Safety (COS), founded soon after the Macondo mega-oil spill by the American Petroleum Institute (API) to calm public anxiety. Since then, it has promoted safety dialogues between GOM operators, contractors, and regulators. What it hasn’t done is engage with Mexico. “Our mission stops at the U.S.-Mexico maritime boundary,” COS director Russell Holms told us. Several years ago, expressive of their U.S. GOM focus, API and COS discontinued their subscription to Mexico Energy Intelligence™. These facts and considerations come together in a worrisome outlook for GOM offshore safety. For a selected list of reports on Offshore Safety, click here.

In opinion pieces in The Houston Chronicle and Mexico City’s Reforma, we opposed the sale by Shell Oil Company of its controlling share in the Deer Park Refinery to a twice-removed affiliate of Pemex. Instead of buying Shell’s interest, in 2017, we had discerned that it would be better for Pemex to find a buyer for its minority share. The Houston-area public has a legitimate concern about how responsibility for environmental liability and decommissioning was negotiated in the sales agreement. The new legal owners are holding companies without a balance sheet that could cover the cost of a major accident or a billion-dollar decommissioning cost. The terms regarding Shell’s residual liability for environmental remediation are confidential. For a selected list of reports on Deer Park Refinery, click here.

The starting point for Mexico’s Energy Reform of 2013-18 is an appreciation of the false cognate relationship between “reform” in English and “reforma” in Spanish. The first refers to the correction of a harmful pattern (as “prison reform”), while the second has no connotation of error-correction whatsoever. “Reformar” means to edit or amend as of an article of the constitution. In this way, the new market designs for oil and electricity were edits to the status quo, not the long-overdue corrections of an investment-stiffling regime. Space was opened in law and regulation in oil production and transportation and in the retail sales of refined products. In the electricity market, investors were allowed only to participate in generation. What was allowed to stay the same—unedited—was the looming figure and vast discretionary authority of the president of Mexico in both the oil and power markets. The reversals of fortune of investors in both markets under President López Obrador point to faulty market designs and an unwillingness of political elites in Mexico to commit to sustainable energy markets. For a selected list of reports on Energy Reform, click here.