For decades, Mexico’s energy policy has largely boiled down to exporting oil for cash to fund state spending. Now the new government is negotiating with rival political parties to curb that practice and instead use state monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos to a different end: cheaper energy, said Pemex CEO Emilio Lozoya.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the 38-year-old chief said the administration of President Enrique Peña Nieto was striving to overhaul tax and energy laws this year that Mr. Lozoya said would result in cheaper energy for consumers and companies that could drive a more competitive economy.
There’s also shale, too:
Mexico may hold the world’s fourth-biggest reserves of shale gas, according to the U.S. government. But Pemex has drilled only a few wells and not produced any gas. “Mexico ought to be producing more of its own gas, and eventually exporting it,” Mr. Lozoya, a lawyer and economist who got his master’s degree in public policy at Harvard said. “Clearly the geology that you have in some parts of the U.S. extends into Mexican territory. So it’s a matter of just investing and getting it done.”
Here in the USA, the government is holding up the Keystone pipeline, bans itself from off-shore drilling, and Obama pours money on “green” failures like Solyndra and other duds. Case in point:
President Barack Obama used his fifth State of the Union address to extol the virtue and job-creating power of federal investment in solar, wind and advanced battery development. Maybe he should have consulted his Department of Energy first.
In a scathing report issued Wednesday, the department’s Office of Inspector General said LG Chem Michigan Inc. misused most of $150 million in federal grants to build its battery cell manufacturing plant in Holland. The company used taxpayer dollars to pay employees to volunteer at local nonprofits, play games and watch movies.
Obama does not see how high-technology, industrialized economies run, grow, and thrive on cheap energy.
But hey, we’re talking about someone who said in the SOTU
“As long as countries like China keep going all in on clean energy, so must we.”
As IBD points out (h/t Instapundit)
All in? Sixteen of the world’s top 20 most polluted cities are in China. The New York Times reported just a couple weeks ago that Beijing’s air quality ranked a “crazy bad” 755 on a scale of 0 to 500.
The country has been building a new coal plant almost every week and plans 363 more, and China now emits almost twice as much CO2 as the U.S.
Mexico has a long way to go to a de-nationalization of the oil industry sector, which would solve many of its problems. The US, however, is set on taking the wrong path.