Quote:
After decades of sliding investment, Mexico's oil and gas reserves are now in the throes of a full-blown crisis and could lead to falling crude exports if new investment does not come soon, said a top official on Thursday.
Raul Munoz, director of giant state oil monopoly Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex), said investment in Mexico's bountiful oil and gas deposits fell by nearly a two-thirds between 1981 and 2000.
``This has provoked a crisis in oil reserves that has already extended to production and should not be allowed to go on any longer,'' Munoz told reporters. ``Production declines are already a reality at some oil fields.''
The revelation is doubly troubling for Mexico, the world's No. 7 oil producer. Not only does the government rely on oil for one-third of its overall revenues, but any decline in output would jeopardize Mexico's share of the U.S. market, the crown jewel of world energy markets.
Munoz, an engineer and longtime private sector executive who took the helm of Pemex in December, has long said that Pemex desperately needs new sources of investment to beef up reserves.
But the chief Pemex official has never sounded a call of alarm over Mexico's reserve levels.
``A bigger crisis in reserves and production could mean ... the risk of running out of natural gas, and further down the road, a drop in oil exports,'' Munoz said.
Pemex, the world's seventh-biggest oil company, said in March that proven reserves posted a 4 percent decline in 2000 to 32.614 billion barrels, while probable reserves rose slightly in 2000 from the year before to 12.196 billion barrels.
Munoz noted a further sign of Pemex's faltering on the reserves front. After a spate of discoveries in the 1970s and early 1980s, Pemex did not make a significant new find until the offshore Sihil field was found in 1999.
CASH COW STATUS
The key culprit in Mexico's failure to invest in its subsoil resources is Pemex's status as the government's cash cow. Each year the behemoth sends nearly all its revenues to the government, which then parcels out cash to Pemex as part of the annual budget.
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