Pemex Begins Drilling for Extraction Recovery

Petroleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), affected by corruption and fuel theft, received Friday the authorization from the National Hydrocarbons Commission to drill a well in an important area of the Gulf of Mexico.

The division PEMEX Exploration and Production (PEP) has permission for its drills to operate in the Asab 1-EXP well, located in shallow waters about 60 kilometers northwest of Dos Bocas, Tabasco, where it is intended to build the seventh refinery in the country.

The drilling work will begin on Jan 28 in that area to be exploited by a private company, and which is one of the largest findings made in the world in the past five years, the company confirmed.

Asab 1-EXP is located 180 meters from the limits of an area belonging to the consortium formed by the United States Talos Energy, the Mexican Sierra Oil and Gas and the British Premier Oil, which discovered in the Zama well a deposit containing up to two billion barrels of light oil. With the energy reform, Mexico's extractive activity - which allowed the country's current economic development since 1938 when oil was nationalized by President Lazaro Cardenas - had stagnated to such an extent that the nation moved from a crude oil producer to an importer.

The same happened with the refineries whose facilities became outdated due to a lack of investment in their technological renovation, both with national and foreign resources never received, and Mexico has had to buy abroad, mainly the United States, 600,000 out of 800,000 liters of fuel consumed daily.

With the construction of a new refinery in Dos Bocas and the modernization of the remaining ones so that they can process national crude oil, the government intends to self-sufficient in gasoline as in the past and return to the low retail prices which are higher now than in the United States and other producing and even non-producing countries, quoted at more than one dollar per liter.