About Mexico Energy Intelligence™

Mexico Energy Intelligence™ (MEI) is a digital newsletter that reports on institutions and market, legal, and regulatory developments in Mexico’s energy sector, with an emphasis on the upstream and midstream oil and gas markets.

The reports are prepared by a bi-national team of analysts, who draw on our in-house data resources, market familiarity, and not-for-profit sources in industry and government who advise us on technical topics such as farmouts, unitization, and wellbore integrity. We look for correspondence and departures from global standards of governance, policy and regulation.

The governance of Pemex, for example, departs from the standard of Equinor, Norway’s national oil company, by the role allowed by law and custom for the president of Mexico to appoint and remove executives, set business strategy, and influence commercial decisions. In 2017, we prepared a strategy for a second national oil company, Pemex 2.0, which would have market capitalization and professional management–sans le président.

Another departure from global standards concerns safety statistics: Pemex reports accident frequency and severity, but without separately reporting incidents offshore. In this way, there is no public record of Pemex’s offshore safety readiness and record.

Our reports are meant for investors and other economic actors, including regulators, who want to add an extra layer of due diligence regarding opportunity and risk in Mexico’s energy sector.

Some of our reports take the form of interviews with specialists. Geologist Vic Abadie in 2019 offered insights about the geology of a Pemex exploration area in the southeast. The late Ron Sweatman dedicated days in 2015 to explaining to us what went wrong downhole at the Macondo-1 in 2010.

The research and editorial efforts are led by George Baker, who, since 1996, has been a voice in the business and academic communities of Houston and Mexico City regarding matters related to Mexico’s oil and gas and power industries.

His 2020 article in The Houston Chronicle correctly foresaw the scenario in which Pemex two years later would gain majority ownership and control of the Zama reservoir that had been discovered by a consortium led by Talos Energy, LLC. His commentary has been published in Mexico City in Reforma, Milenio, and Mexican Law Review, among others.

During Mexico’s Energy Reform of 2014, he was a Scholar and Expert at Rice University’s Baker Institute of Public Policy. In 1999, he was the keynote speaker at the first Energy Day™ conference sponsored by the British Chamber of Commerce in Mexico City.

Earlier in his career as a business writer, he was a Latin American market analyst with Lundberg Survey, Inc., and, later, editor, of Lundberg Letter, a newsletter for the retail gasoline market. Earlier still, he was a Fulbright Exchange Scholar at Mexico’s National University.

He was one of two Houston guests at the 2018 inauguration of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Next year, he was the moderator of Mexico at the Offshore Technology Conference.