The face of anti-globalization in the energy sector
in Mexico has reappeared in public statements by two prominent Mexican personages, former Pemex CEO Adrián Lajous and three-time
Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) presidential candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.
The first in a long article published in Este
Pais (September 2006), a magazine owned by a family with Institutional Revolutionary Party affiliations. And the latter
via a paid announcement (and therefore not accessible on the Internet) in Milenio (October 20, 2006), listing a nine
point proposed energy policy.
Lajous
For having been a manager and executive in
Pemex for nearly 20 years, Lajous is certainly familiar with its institutional workings, projects, accomplishments and shortcomings.
For having these qualifications, his wide-ranging use of quantified data (as, for example, production costs) carries an air
of authority.
In his 12-page tightly argued article, Lajous reviews many of the management issues and ideas related
to the oil sector that have been floated during the Vicente Fox administration — Pemex fiscal and labor reforms, for
example. Most of his analysis however is devoted to upstream issues. Lajous underscores the need to strengthen Pemex's
portfolio of prospects and discoveries, and he comments on the difficulties that will be caused by the decline of Cantarell,
Mexico's major Maya-grade crude oil production field.
Lajous is silent in this article on the current proposal to reorganize
Pemex into one legal entity, thereby erasing the fifteen-year experiment that he himself initiated that created a headquarters
unit and four legally independent subsidiaries. While noting that Pemex's proposals to develop KMZ (Ku-Maloob-Zaap) and Chicontepec are intended to replace
the volumes lost in Cantarell, he is silent on the point that the oil of the first of these two complexes is of inferior value
compared to that of Cantarell.
A proposal of the current Pemex administration to which he takes exception
concerns the need for strategic alliances with international oil companies. Lajous insists that the "diagnosis" is mistaken,
as there is no technological advantage that cannot be bought on the open market. In taking this position, Lajous aligns
himself with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, whose statements to the effect that international oil companies are unnecessary
for Mexico appeared in the Mexican press on October 10, 2006."Pemex needs alliances
with Mexican companies," Slim was quoted as having said.
Cárdenas
A rumor is floating around Mexico that President-elect
Felipe Calderón has offered, as a gesture of reconciliation to the Cárdenas wing of the PRD, two cabinet positions and the
director generalship of Pemex — provided that it is Cárdenas himself who takes the Pemex post.
In his nine-point
paid public notice, published not in La Jornada — the normal venue for the Mexican left — but in the centrist
Milenio newspaper, Cárdenas goes over much of the same ground as that covered by Lajous, but with notable exceptions.
Cárdenas proposes that the Mexican Congress, not the Executive, should make the decisions on oil extraction levels. He also
proposes that Mexico should reduce its oil exports, even eliminating them entirely, and that the country should concentrate
on petrochemicals and refined products. Unlike Lajous, he supports the proposal to reintegrate Pemex into a single legal
structure.
Observations
• In trivializing the need for strategic alliances with international oil
companies, Lajous is reaffirming a position that he has held for more than 20 years. The topic of international oil companies
does not even deserve mention by Cárdenas.
• The call by Cárdenas to end oil exports, if implemented, would not
only jar the international oil market and raise pump prices in the United States, but too it would provoke an unprecedented
financial crisis in Mexico.
• Lajous and Cárdenas speak about Pemex plans to increase oil production in order
to compensate for the Cantarell decline, but the proposed volumes from KMZ and Chicontepec will be of a far inferior quality.
The fact that Lajous and Cárdenas speak "volumetrically" about replacing Cantarell barrels as if they were fungible with those
of KMZ, also speaks to the yet unacknowledged shortcomings in Pemex's portfolio of upstream assets and prospects. • Cárdenas is exploiting the
anniversary of his father's death (October 19, 1970) to advance his own political causes and career by means of overtures
to the incoming Calderón administration.His still revered father, President
Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), nationalized Mexico’s petroleum reserves in 1938 in an expropriation that was highly popular
at the time, and even now is politically venerated by many.
——————————
George Baker, a MexiData.info guest columnist, is the director of Energia.com, a publishing and consulting firm based in Houston.He
can be reached via e-mail at g.baker@energia.com.
