SENER

It may take a number of years to pan out, but Mexico is taking steps to accelerate the development of its natural gas-rich Burgos Shale region, which lies just across the Rio Grande from South Texas’s newly resurgent Eagle Ford play. Today (July 12, 2017), Mexico’s Secretaría de Energía (SENER) is expected to name the winners of a competitive bidding process for the rights to drill for natural gas within 1,500 square miles in the states of Nuevo Leon and Tamaulipas. If the effort to juice Burgos drilling activity and production proves successful, it could affect how much natural gas Mexico needs to import from the U.S. Today we discuss the prospects for reversing gas production declines south of the border and the challenges that exploration and production companies (E&Ps) face in Mexico’s most promising shale play.

There is a natural gas renaissance of sorts happening south of the U.S.-Mexico border. The state-owned Comisión Federal de Electricidad (CFE) is investing heavily in expanding and modernizing its power generation fleet with thousands of megawatts of new, natural gas-fired power plants, and the energy secretary also last October put forth an aggressive five-year plan to build out a pipeline system to supply growing gas-fired generation demand. Mexico’s power generation demand is increasingly a target for U.S. gas producers and pipeline projects. At the same time, as we discuss in Part 2 of RBN’s Miles and Miles of Texas Drill-Down Report published last week, a good portion of this new demand is relying on — and in large part has been driven by — availability of low-priced gas from the U.S. via Texas and the U.S. Southwest states. But there is a lot that needs to happen on both sides of the border over the next few years to facilitate this mutually beneficial relationship. Already since October, Mexico’s newly appointed independent pipeline operator, Centro Nacional de Control del Gas Natural (CENAGAS), has pulled back on the pipeline buildout. Today, we begin a two-part series on how plans to facilitate this new demand are progressing, starting on the Mexico side of things.