By Laurence Iliff and Juan Montes | The Wall Street Journal
Mexico moved to end the country’s 75-year-old monopoly on oil and gas production, potentially opening up some of the world’s biggest remaining untapped oil reserves to private companies and setting the stage for a new energy boom on the U.S. doorstep.
The government on Monday unveiled a bill to change the constitution to let it partner with private companies to find and produce oil and gas in a country that is the third biggest supplier of crude to the U.S. and has the world’s fourth biggest reserves of shale gas.
State oil monopoly Petróleos Mexicanos, the sole producer of oil and gas in Mexico, now pays a fee to service companies to do everything from exploration to drill wells. But that model has failed to attract interest from major oil companies and led oil production here to plummet.
Major oil companies that have struggled to find big new oil fields are likely to find appeal in the relatively familiar geology and operating conditions of Mexico versus the Arctic or some politically unstable regions of Africa and the Middle East, particularly those active on the U.S. side of the Gulf of Mexico.
