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The Battle for Pemex: a Mexican Oil Worker Explains Energy Reform
Kristin Bricker, The Narcosphere (Report’s Notebook)
Mexican Congress approves light reforms for the state oil company; legislators vow to continue the campaign to privatize Pemex
Trojan horseMexican Congress approved light reforms to the state-owned oil monopoly Pemex at the end of October 2008. While the details of the reforms have still not been published in the government’s Official Diary of the Federation, details are trickling out through the media.
… The one thing the entire country agrees upon is that Pemex is in dire need of reform; the question is what kind of reform. Pemex’s infrastructure is on average 25 years old. Pemex’s refining capacity is severely insufficient. Overall production has fallen at least 10% over the past year.
… Gomezcaña Morales [former Pemex worker and current economist for the National Union of Trustworthy Petroleum Industry Workers, a Pemex workers’ union]:
Peak oil is a reality. Peak oil is petroleum’s downfall. This year we’ve hit peak oil at a global level—we’ve reached the zenith, and now comes the drop in petroleum reserves. We’re seeing this in Mexico. Mexico will stop producing petroleum. We’re not finding new oilfields. We’re already experiencing a strong decrease in petroleum reserves globally.
The problem is that there aren’t alternative projects. The few projects that exist that are searching for alternative energy sources are redundant. Foreigners are carrying out these projects. It’s written into Plan Puebla Panama that in the case of Mexico’s wind power, instead of the [state-owned] electric company[4] having the responsibility to invest in wind power projects, they grant the right to install windmills in this zone to foreign private companies like Spain’s Repsol. It’s our wind, even though that sounds a little abstract. The profits won’t be for Mexico. The profits are for the foreign companies. Repsol doesn’t even have the infrastructure to carry out these types of projects. Repsol subcontracts the work to other foreign companies, just like Halliburton does. And they keep granting these projects to Repsol and Halliburton because the neoliberal governments—like Mexico’s—allow it.
Something else very important is going on in Mexico. No other country would permit the conflict of interests that exists in the Mexican Ministry of the Interior (Segob in its Spanish initials). Felipe Calderon’s little pet Juan Camilo Mouriño [the current Secretary of the Interior] has a conflict of interest in our country’s energy sector.[5] He’s Spanish. So he’s promoting Spanish investment in our country. They have vested interests here.
To sum it up, there are two completely different projects here: the Global South’s project and the North’s project. Those of us from below, and the powerful. Those of us who defend all of our resources—one of them being petroleum—from projects like Plan Puebla Panama, and those who want what’s ours.
(4 November 2008)
Myanmar’s farmers pay for China’s oil thirst
Marwaan Macan-Markar, Asia Times
BANGKOK – The largest island off Myanmar’s west coast is emerging as another frontier for China’s expanding plans to extract the rich oil and gas reserves of military-ruled Myanmar.
Initial explorations by a consortium, led by China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), has left a deep scar on Ramree Island, which is twice the size of Singapore and home to about 400,000 people. ”They have destroyed rice fields and plantations when conducting the seismic surveys and mining the island in search of oil,” says Jockai Khaing, director of Arakan Oil Watch (AOW), an environmental group of Myanmar people living in exile.
”The local communities have been directly and indirectly affected,” he said.
(4 November 2008)
Opening Up Mexico’s Oil to Foreigners: A First Step
Ioan Grillo, TIME Magazine
For months, the debate over opening up Mexico’s petroleum industry to foreign companies raged in the streets. Thousands of riot police held back screaming protesters from invading the Senate. Mammoth rallies screamed that the president was a puppet, selling its nationalized oil wealth out to the gringos. Banner-bearing lawmakers opposed to the president’s proposal camped with sleeping bags on the podium of Congress, shutting down the legislature for weeks, as the arguments went back and forth, for and against giving international oil giants the right to sink deep wells in Mexican territory and waters, long the sacrosanct monopoly of the country’s national oil corporation.
The result is this week’s watered down energy reform legislation, supported by the govenrment and most of the opposition. It amounts to far less than the hungry companies had hoped for when President Felipe Calderon first floated the idea of opening up the oil industry in January. There are no sweeping constitutional changes to allow foreign corporations a share in the deepwater reserves in the Gulf of Mexico, which may hold as much as 50 billion barrels. Nor will the trans-nationals be able to build and run refineries on Mexican soil as Calderon proposed in his bill filed in April. The thrust of the new law approved Tuesday is simply to allow government oil monopoly Pemex to subcontract foreign companies to explore and drill in specific parts of Mexico. Furthermore, crucial clauses allow Pemex to be able pay those companies by performance.
However, analysts say that for Calderon to be able to touch the sacred cow of Mexican oil at all is a major advance, which could open the door to deeper changes in the following years in Mexico…
(31 October 2008)
No mention of the peaking of oil production in Mexico. Article is pretty ideological even by American standards (slanted toward oil companies, denigrating Mexico’s desires to control its own resources). -BA
