First modification: 20/02/2021 – 04:01
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The flow of fuel from Texas to some Mexican power plants has been limited in recent days due to low temperatures in the southern United States.
“Turn off your light bulbs.” This call from Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador was repeated this week, amid a severe shortage of natural gas that has caused frequent power outages.
The scarce supply has its origin in the frosts that hit the southern United States, from where Mexico imports much of the natural gas that it uses as fuel for its power plants.
On Tuesday, January 16, 2021, Mexico’s National Center for Natural Gas Control (Cenagas) declared a “critical alert” due to the limited flow of fuel.
On the same Tuesday, the National Center for Energy Control (Cenace), operator of the Mexican electricity system, announced power outages scheduled for the center and west of the country after a massive blackout that the previous Monday had affected 4.7 million users of the North.
The blackout affected users in Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Durango and Zacatecas.
A difficult promise to keep
The second largest economy in Latin America generates most of its energy from natural gas, mainly imported from the United States. But shipments it receives from Texas pipelines fell about 75% over the past week, causing billions of dollars in losses from power outages and factory closures.
The Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, proposed this Friday, February 19, that his country be a “safe supplier” of gas for Mexico.
“Looking at the gas production plans, we should propose to be safe gas suppliers to Mexico for its energy efficiency,” Maduro said at a meeting in which he also promised to boost the Venezuelan oil industry.
A similar offer received Colombia a few years ago. Under an exchange agreement, this country exported natural gas to Venezuela for eight years, until 2015, and from the first of 2016 the sale had to be reversed. However, to date the first cubic foot of Colombian gas has not passed to the neighboring country.
With EFE and Reuters
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