Pena Nieto Ponders Easier Way to Open Mexican Oil Industry

Bloomberg, 10/4/2012

Enrique Peña Nieto

President-elect Enrique Pena Nieto’s team is looking at ways to open up Mexico’s energy industry that wouldn’t require changes to the constitution, a top economic adviser said.

Pena Nieto wants to break state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos’s monopoly on refining and exploration and is considering legislation that wouldn’t involve the two-thirds congressional majority needed for constitutional changes, Ildefonso Guajardo said. Pemex, as the company is known, is struggling to reverse seven years of production declines that have cut output 25 percent from a peak of 3.4 million barrels a day in 2004.

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Pemex Overhaul Harder as PRI Misses Mexican Congress Majority

Bloomberg, 07/03/2012

Incoming Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto will struggle to overhaul the state-run oil industry, a project he has called his “signature issue,” after his party won fewer seats in Congress than pre-election polls forecast.

That leaves Pena Nieto dependent on the opposition to overhaul tax and labor laws, and his PRI well short of the two- thirds majority needed for constitutional changes to open up the oil industry to private investment. He must now convince much of the opposition and his own party to back a law that he says is needed to reverse seven years of declining output in the largest supplier of crude to the U.S.

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