When the National Hydrocarbons Commission of Mexico scheduled its first-ever shale tender for September this year, the July elections were obviously not front and center in the thoughts of its management. Yet now, this tender may be as good as gone after President-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador said last week,“We will no longer use that method to extract petroleum.” Obrador was responding to a question about the risks of hydraulic fracturing, the technology that enabled the U.S. shale oil and gas boom and that some believed could be replicated in Mexico, especially for gas production. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimated in 2013 that Mexico has unproved but technically recoverable shale gas resources of 545.2 trillion cubic feet. Most of this, around 343 trillion cubic feet plus about 6.3 billion barrels of oil (half of the total shale oil resource base), is located in the Burgos Basin , which […]