LatAmOil: Pemex’s big discovery

Mexico’s national oil company (NOC) Pemex has reported the discovery of a large new field off the coast of Tabasco State in the southern Gulf. Octavio Romero, the CEO of Pemex, has described the site as “gigantic” and says it may hold as much as 1bn barrels of crude in combination with other nearby deposits.

Romero did not identify the new field, saying that Pemex intended to wait until March 18, the date of a national holiday celebrating the government’s expropriation of oil assets held by foreign companies, to make more details of the find public. He did, however, defend the Mexican government’s decision to keep the NOC’s fields in production all the way through 2020, despite calls for slowing upstream development operations in response to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.