The president-elect of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, said today that the country will only extract the oil it requires to satisfy domestic consumption and that it will stop exporting this resource abroad.
“Mexico is no longer going to sell, in the medium term, crude oil abroad; We want to process all our raw material,” said the leftist politician at a conference held in the southern state of Tabasco.
López Obrador said that his government will not aspire to “extract a lot of oil,” because “that is an inheritance that must be left to the new generations.” “We are going to extract only what is needed for our internal consumption, ” he added.
For this “what we need is around 2.5 million barrels (daily); that is our goal, not to produce, like 2003 or 2004, 3.4 million barrels “.
The politician said that oil is a non-renewable resource and that, therefore, we must “take care of it” and not betting to extract it in “excessive” amounts.
Instead, work will be done to strengthen renewable energies, such as wind and solar, in which more investment will be made, he said.
Despite this, the leader of the National Regeneration Movement again defended his approach that oil production, anyway, has to increase, because currently “we are producing just 1.8 million barrels per day.”
Since the 2013 energy reform, driven by the current government of Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico has lost “1.2 barrels per day of crude oil production,” he said.
“That is why it is urgent to extract oil, intervene to drill wells and extract oil from wells that are already in production and that require special intervention,” he said.
Last July, López Obrador announced a total investment of $304,000 million pesos ($16,069 million dollars) to strengthen the Mexican energy sector and increase oil production.
The newly elected president, who takes office on December 1, will build a new refinery in the oil port of Dos Bocas (Tabasco), with which the president-elect intends to fulfill his campaign promise to stop buying gasoline abroad.
