Like a Scene from Dante, the night sky south of Villahermosa is filled with a fiery glow. It comes from great gouts of flame that flare off natural gas from scores of wells dotting the steamy marshes, scrubs and jungles of the aptly named state of Tabasco in southeast Mexico. Every day, 300 million cu. ft. of gas, enough to supply the energy needs of Vermont for a month, are simply burned off, in part, because the U.S. Government refuses to pay the price that Mexico demands. The huge gas supply and the appalling waste are symbolic of the future promise and present uncertainty of Mexico's growing oil and gas discoveries, findings that are propelling the poor but potentially mighty neighbor across the river into the world of petropower and intrigue.
Interest in Mexico's energy wealth reached fever pitch last month, when Pemex, the government monopoly, revealed the latest strike in the Chicontepec field near the Gulf Coast city of Tampico. Pemex Chief Jorge Diaz Serrano estimated that the field would double the country's potential reserves of oil and gas to more than 200 billion bbl.
In the dizzying realm of oil statistics, that rough estimate requires major qualification. Reserves are measured in three ways: proven, probable and potential. Unlike other countries, Mexico further complicates matters by lumping oil and gas together; about two-thirds are oil, one-third gas. The government figures its proven reserves—oil and gas that can be recovered with existing technology at current prices—at 20 billion bbl. This total is expected to be raised soon to about 30 billion bbl., which would make Mexico's known supplies of oil slightly larger than those of Venezuela or Nigeria, though far smaller than Saudi Arabia's 160 billion bbl. The official reckoning of the much less certain probable reserves, which might be retrieved from fields already discovered but not fully explored or developed, is about 37 billion bbl. Potential reserve estimates, like those used for the Chicontepec field, cover all the oil that might be in the field whether or not it is recoverable.
No matter how it is gauged, all this is splendid news for Mexicans, millions of who live in poverty. Pemex hopes to lift production from its present 1.5 million bbl. a day to 2.5 million by 1980. At the same time, it expects to triple its oil exports to 1 million bbl. a day, mainly to the U.S. (whose total imports now are 9.1 million bbl.). As a result, oil earnings are expected to hit $8 billion annually by 1980.
The Mexican finds are significant but hardly a complete solution to future energy shortages. At best, oil from Mexico would put off the projected fuel crunch from the late 1980s to the early 1990s. But together with other potential big fields—in China, Iraq, Canada, South America, Alaska and elsewhere—the new bonanza in Mexico could enable the world to scrape by into the 21st century, by which time energy from alternative sources may be widely available.