Texas Looks to Gain on Mexico's Natural Gas Squeeze Houston Chronicle
go to original September 3, 2012

MEXICO CITY - Mexico's national oil monopoly has been issuing critical alerts seemingly every week, warning of natural gas shortages lasting hours or even days and crimping supplies to homes, power plants and factories.

And yet, the country has some of the world's largest natural gas reserves and easy access to a cheap and plentiful U.S. supply.

"There hasn't been enough energy planning in this country," said Raul Monteforte, a former senior official with Mexico's Energy Regulatory Commission who's now development director for Fermaca, a private Mexican transportation pipeline company. "Huge errors of omission have brought us a gas crisis."

The gas squeeze will only worsen as many of Mexico's new and existing electricity plants abandon coal and other fuels in favor of natural gas, gobbling up much of the available supply.

Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, as the monopoly is called, will prove unable to get much more of the gas produced in its own fields to market.

Amid renewed political pressure to further open Mexico's energy industries to private interests, energy planners have launched a frenzied expansion of the country's woeful pipeline system. As much as 3 billion additional cubic feet per day of U.S. natural gas, most of it from Texas, will feed the new grid.

Read more at The Houston Chronicle

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