Foreign oil frms wavering in the upstream

摘要

Mexico’s oil nationalist president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has embarked on a hatchet job of the country’s 2014 energy reform over the past two years, attempting to re-establish state-owned monopolies within the power and midstream sectors and to forcibly renegotiate contracts. Foreign upstream operators have had a bumpy couple of years — faced with operating restrictions and crude price volatility caused by Covid-19 — but, perhaps surprisingly, their investments continue to tick up and they maintain long-term commitments to Mexico, at least publicly. But last month’s decision to award opera- torship of the country’s frst independent upstream discovery, Zama — a giant shallow-water feld discovered by US frm Talos Energy in 2017 — to state-owned Pemex, appears to cleave more to ideological than technical considerations.