Oil in Mexico

The petroleum industry in Mexico makes Mexico the eleventh largest producer of oil in the world and the thirteenth largest in terms of net exports. Mexico has the seventeenth largest oil reserves in the world, and it is the fourth largest oil producer in the Western Hemisphere behind the United States, Canada and Venezuela. Mexico is not a member of the OPEC (the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) or any petroleum production related organizations, but since 1994 it is a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The state-owned company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) has exclusive rights over all oil production in Mexico. The petroleum sector is crucial to the Mexican economy; while its oil production has fallen in recent years, oil revenues still generate over 10% of Mexico's export earnings. High taxes on the revenues of Pemex provide about a third of all the tax revenues collected by the Mexican government.

Petroleum was known in Mexico before the arrival of the Spaniards and used by the natives for incense and to repair canoes. In Mexico's colonial era (1521-1821), ranchers lost cattle to tar pits in the Gulf Coast Region, so it was considered more of a hazard than a valuable resource. Exploratory wells were first drilled in Mexico in 1869 by Mexican and some U.S. entrepreneurs.

Development of petroleum took place as Mexico's railway system was developed in the 1880s and 1890s, allowing petroleum to reach export markets; before that there was no internal market for Mexican petroleum and no way for petroleum to be easily exported. By 1901, commercial production of crude oil in Mexico had begun. California oil entrepreneur Edward L. Doheny opened the Ebano oil field along the Mexican Central Railway.

In 1889, the Veracruz legislature passed a law titled “Ley sobre subdivision de la propiedad territorial", under which the state gave land titles to private owners. The privatization of land allowed state to declare any land that was not privatized to be public land. In 1883, the Mexican Congress passed the “Ley de Colonization," which allowed private land companies to survey public lands for the purpose of subdivision and settlement. For their work surveying this public land, the company would receive one-third the surveyed land, and gave them the opportunity to buy the remaining two-thirds at a very low cost. This allowed more than 132 million acres of Mexican land to be owned by the surveyors. By the early twentieth century the reapportionment was complete. The law divided former communal land and large estates into small, privately owned lots. Dealing with private landowners made it easier for foreign oil companies to buy or lease oil property. Many property owners considered the up-front bonus they received for leasing their property to be “easy money.” A typical oil lease allowed the property owners remain on the land; if the company did not start producing oil from the land within the term of the lease, commonly five years, the company would leave, and the owner still had the lease bonus money.

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