Mexico will offer its first oil drilling contracts to private companies as early as this year after the nation ended its 75-year state monopoly on crude production, Finance Minister Luis Videgaray said.
“Toward the end of this year or at the beginning of next year we’ll hold the first contract tenders for profit sharing, production sharing or licenses,” Videgaray said in an interview on Radio Formula today.
The government is seeking congressional approval in the session ending in April secondary legislation to implement the oil law approved in December, Videgaray said. His forecast for license tenders as soon as this year contrasts with an Energy Ministry official who said foreign producers will have to wait about two years before they can bid on their own fields.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed a law in December allowing foreign companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp. to produce crude in the largest supplier to the U.S. after Canada and Saudi Arabia. The law aims to arrest nine straight years of declines in Mexico’s oil output and will boost annual gross domestic product growth 1 percentage point by 2018, the government has said.
Enrique Ochoa, a deputy energy minister named yesterday to head the state power company known as CFE, said in an interview in January that foreign companies would have to wait until as late as next year to bid on crude fields without state-owned producer Petroleos Mexicanos.
Pemex, as the company is known, expects to sign the first exploration and output agreements with international companies as early as year-end, Emilio Lozoya, its chief executive officer, said in a Jan. 26 interview.
Production averaged 2.52 million barrels a day of crude in 2013, the ninth straight year of declines as output at Mexico’s biggest discovery, Cantarell, plunged over the past decade. The oil overhaul may bring $20 billion more in foreign direct investment as soon as 2015, Bank of America Corp. has said.
“Toward the end of this year or at the beginning of next year we’ll hold the first contract tenders for profit sharing, production sharing or licenses,” Videgaray said in an interview on Radio Formula today.
The government is seeking congressional approval in the session ending in April secondary legislation to implement the oil law approved in December, Videgaray said. His forecast for license tenders as soon as this year contrasts with an Energy Ministry official who said foreign producers will have to wait about two years before they can bid on their own fields.
President Enrique Pena Nieto signed a law in December allowing foreign companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp. to produce crude in the largest supplier to the U.S. after Canada and Saudi Arabia. The law aims to arrest nine straight years of declines in Mexico’s oil output and will boost annual gross domestic product growth 1 percentage point by 2018, the government has said.
Enrique Ochoa, a deputy energy minister named yesterday to head the state power company known as CFE, said in an interview in January that foreign companies would have to wait until as late as next year to bid on crude fields without state-owned producer Petroleos Mexicanos.
Pemex, as the company is known, expects to sign the first exploration and output agreements with international companies as early as year-end, Emilio Lozoya, its chief executive officer, said in a Jan. 26 interview.
Production averaged 2.52 million barrels a day of crude in 2013, the ninth straight year of declines as output at Mexico’s biggest discovery, Cantarell, plunged over the past decade. The oil overhaul may bring $20 billion more in foreign direct investment as soon as 2015, Bank of America Corp. has said.
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