Two weeks after a disappointing joint-venture contract auction, state oil company Pemex reported poor November results, with crude oil exports threatening 25-year lows.
Pemex reported production of 1.624 million barrels per day (bpd) in November, a drop of 1.9% compared to the same month last year (1.656 million bpd).
Including private trading partners such as Harbour Energy, average production in November was 1.641 million bpd, down from 1.673 million bpd produced a year ago. This also translates to a 1.9% downturn.
The oil company has yet to meet the federal government’s target of producing an average of 1.8 million bpd. The November figure, excluding trading partners, is 176,000 barrels below the target.
Oil export revenues are also slumping, on track to close the year at levels not seen in the last 25 years, the newspaper El Financiero reported. Company revenues hit US $925.4 million in November, a 50% drop compared to the same month in 2024.
This marks the third time this year oil export revenues failed to reach US $1 billion, the others being June (US $862 million) and August (US $954 million).
Pemex accumulated US $12.337 billion in “external sales” through the first 11 months of the year, a figure roughly comparable with the average income recorded at the beginning of this century.
Between 2000 and 2002, Pemex earned between US $13 and US $14 billion annually from crude oil exports, registering a historical high of US $49.4 billion in 2011, when the price of a barrel of oil exceeded US $101.
The volume of crude oil exports in November was 539,000 bpd, down 43% compared to the 951,000 barrels per day reported in November 2024.
Intelligence and forecasting company Industrial Info Resources reported earlier this month that Pemex’s oil production “has been declining for over two decades,” driven by “the natural decline of mature oil fields and lower investment in upstream operations.”
Average production for the year through November reached 1.616 million bbd, down 7.8% from the first 11 months of 2024 when Pemex averaged 1.754 million bbd.
Pemex had hoped to stabilize oil production at 1.8 million bpd over the next decade and investments have risen since the Finance Ministry announced a new financing plan in August.
Earlier this month, however, it failed to attract major companies during a joint-venture contract auction.
According to an exclusive report by Reuters news agency, Pemex awarded just five of the 11 new contracts it hoped to ink before the end of the year. The so-called “mixed contracts” are the first of their kind in Mexico.
Pemex’s partners in these five contracts are primarily local companies, Reuters said, and Pemex would have stakes of between 40% and 85%.
Reuters said the production added by the ventures is unlikely to reverse Mexico’s declining crude oil output.
With reports from El Financiero, El Economista and La Jornada
