Does Mexican Energy Reform Invite Ecocide? Kent Paterson - Frontera NorteSur
go to original December 16, 2013

In the heady debates over energy reform that riveted the Mexican Congress last week, one crucial issue was glaringly absent from the central points of discussion that underpinned the changes to the Constitution: the environmental impacts of increased gas and oil production.

At a time of historic declines in Mexico’s production of conventional oil, the geologic and economic realities of the energy sector strongly suggest that any serious surge in fossil fuel exploitation will take place in the environmentally sensitive ecosystem of the Gulf of Mexico or on land through the controversial method of hydraulic fracturing, popularly known as fracking.

... In this emerging scenario, some environmentalists are sounding the alarm bell. In a statement released just days prior to the Mexican Congress’ votes to approve the Pena Nieto administration’s energy reform package, the Mexican Alliance Against Fracking warned of the danger to the nation’s fragile water supplies by the practice of injecting toxic chemicals along with water and sand to break up shale rock or coal beds and access energy reserves. The environmental group asserted that such fracking in the United States had left wells commercially useless.

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