Mexico hopes for oil!!!

Gulf of Mexico — More than 3,000 feet below these waves, with a drill bit wider than a human thigh, Mexico is digging for its future.

The gulf is one of the world’s great largely unexplored reservoirs of oil and gas, industry experts say, but the state-run oil monopoly Pemex so far has lacked the money and technical capacity to extract from its deeper waters.

Now that the country has passed legislation opening up its beleaguered oil industry to outsiders for the first time in 75 years, the government is hoping that future partnerships with foreign companies to drill for hard-to-access undersea oil will mean billions of dollars of new revenue.

“The easy oil is all gone,” said José Luis Sánchez Mosqueda, a well engineer on the Centenario platform. “We need to get unconventional oil.”

Mexican oil production has fallen by nearly a quarter in the past decade as the easy targets dry up, and Pemex has struggled with inefficiency and mismanagement.

“We’re facing a pretty serious crisis,” said Miriam Grunstein, an oil specialist at CIDE, a public research university in Mexico City.

Pemex officials estimate that 50 billion barrels of oil may reside in the depths of the gulf, more than all their proven reserves on land and in shallower waters. In the gulf’s American waters, oil companies have been pumping oil for years from deep waters, defined as anything below 500 meters (1,640 feet).