Driven by a need for greater energy sovereignty, the Sheinbaum administration is shifting toward a more pragmatic, domestic natural gas strategy by leveraging Mexico's vast unconventional resources and experience in managing regional security risks.
Mexico may be on the verge of one of the most important energy policy shifts of Claudia Sheinbaum’s presidency. After years in which the political conversation around natural gas was shaped by caution, ideological suspicion of private investment, and opposition to hydraulic fracturing, the Mexican government has begun to signal a more pragmatic approach. The change is still careful, qualified, and politically sensitive – but it is real.
The reason is not difficult to understand. Mexico has become overwhelmingly dependent on imported US natural gas. Recent reporting puts Mexican gas consumption at roughly 9 billion cubic feet per day, with about 6.8 billion cubic feet per day supplied by imports, leaving the country exposed to cross-border infrastructure risk, US market volatility, and the politics of North American energy interdependence. At the same time, the government has announced major investments in pipeline construction and maintenance to guarantee supply for new CFE power plants, underscoring just how central gas has become to Mexico’s electricity system and industrial base.
This is the first paradox that Mexico must confront. Natural gas is indispensable to the country’s economic future, but Mexico has not developed its own gas resources at anything close to the scale required by its demand. It has some of the most important shale and unconventional gas potential in the Western Hemisphere, but it still imports most of the gas it consumes. It sits next to the world’s most dynamic natural gas producer, but that proximity has encouraged dependence rather than domestic production. And it has access to both Atlantic and Pacific energy markets, but has largely missed the opportunity to become a serious LNG player at a moment when global demand, especially in Asia, continues to shape long-term energy strategy.
The global context matters. The International Energy Agency expects global gas demand growth to accelerate in 2026, with Asia-Pacific demand increasing by more than 4-percent and accounting for around half of global gas demand growth. Global LNG demand could rise from 422 million metric tons per year in 2025 to between 650 and 710 million metric tons by 2040, driven largely by Asia. These forecasts are contested, and some analysts warn that new LNG capacity could create periods of oversupply. But the strategic point remains: LNG has become central to global energy security, and Mexico has not fully translated its geography or resource base into influence.
For years, the most obvious LNG opportunity in Mexico has been the possibility of moving abundant US gas to the Pacific coast and then onward to Asian markets without the Panama Canal constraint that affects US Gulf Coast exports. Projects such as Mexico Pacific’s proposed Saguaro Energía LNG facility in Sonora have been built around precisely this logic: connecting low-cost American gas to Pacific markets through Mexican territory. Yet even that model is limited if Mexico remains primarily a corridor for US gas rather than a producer of its own.
That is why the Sheinbaum administration’s cautious opening to unconventional gas is so significant. President Sheinbaum’s argument is not that Mexico should abandon environmental concerns or embrace a free-for-all in the energy sector. Rather, she has suggested that newer technologies, different water-use practices, and tighter technical evaluation could allow Mexico to develop domestic gas resources in a more responsible way. Her government has framed this as a matter of energy sovereignty: reducing dependence on US imports while strengthening the reliability of Mexico’s own energy system.
The opportunity is considerable. Mexico’s shale and unconventional gas resources are concentrated in basins that extend south from the prolific geology of Texas into northern Mexico, especially the Burgos Basin. The US Energy Information Administration has long identified Mexico as having very large, technically recoverable shale gas resources, including substantial potential in formations linked geologically to the Eagle Ford Basin. More recent discussion of Mexico’s unconventional resource base has focused on the possibility of developing roughly 141 trillion cubic feet of unconventional gas resources as part of a strategy to reduce import dependence.
The scale of that opportunity should not be exaggerated into inevitability. Technically recoverable resources are not the same as commercially viable reserves. Mexico would still need investment, infrastructure, water management, community engagement, regulatory clarity, environmental safeguards, and service-sector capacity. But the basic strategic question is unavoidable: why should a country with Mexico’s gas potential, industrial ambitions, and electricity demand remain so dependent on imported fuel?
This is where the security argument enters the debate.
For many investors and policymakers, the first reaction to any discussion of expanded oil and gas activity in Mexico is concern about organized crime. That concern is legitimate. Mexico’s security environment is difficult, and organized crime has become a pervasive feature of the operating environment in many parts of the country. Fuel theft, extortion, cargo robbery, illegal taps, and local intimidation are real problems.
But the security risk in Mexico’s energy sector is also frequently exaggerated, or at least poorly understood. I have been studying the Mexican energy sector since 2006, and over the past two decades the question I have been asked – by analysts, policymakers, journalists, and investors alike – more than almost any other is this: how big a threat is organized crime to the oil and gas sector in Mexico? My answer has been broadly consistent for many years. Security concerns in Mexico should always be taken seriously. Organized crime is a real factor in the country’s operating environment, and no responsible company should dismiss it. But the energy sector is also, in important ways, better insulated from organized crime than much of the rest of the economy.
That is not because it is immune from insecurity. It is because oil and gas companies, PEMEX, contractors, and the Mexican state have accumulated decades of experience in managing these risks. The sector has learned how to operate in difficult territory, how to coordinate with public authorities, and how to treat security as a central part of the business model rather than as an afterthought.
The global oil and gas industry is one of the most risk-experienced industries in the world. For decades, it has operated in places affected by civil war, insurgency, terrorism, piracy, kidnapping, sabotage, political instability, and weak state presence. Mexico presents serious challenges, but it is not outside the universe of risk that the industry already knows how to handle. Indeed, compared with many other oil- and gas-producing countries, Mexico offers a combination of institutional experience, infrastructure, proximity to the United States, and state involvement that makes the security challenge manageable rather than exceptional.
Mexico also has its own deep institutional experience. PEMEX has long worked in regions where organized crime, fuel theft, social conflict, and weak local institutions are part of the operating environment. That experience has not eliminated risk, but it has created knowledge: how to move personnel, how to protect installations, how to coordinate with federal authorities, how to distinguish between routine insecurity and direct threats to strategic assets, and how to operate in areas where the state’s presence is uneven.
The third factor is the state itself. Energy in Mexico is not just another commercial sector. It is bound up with sovereignty, national identity, public finance, industrial policy, and constitutional history. An attack on energy infrastructure is therefore not normally treated as a routine criminal event. Pipelines, refineries, platforms, terminals, and fuel logistics assets are part of the country’s strategic infrastructure. As a result, the energy sector has access to forms of federal protection that many other industries do not.
That distinction matters. Agriculture, mining, manufacturing, and logistics are often highly exposed to extortion, cargo theft, local intimidation, and fragmented territorial control. Many of those sectors depend on roads, small producers, dispersed facilities, and local police forces. The energy sector is not invulnerable, but it is more institutionalized. Its assets are more visible. Its operators are more experienced. Its protocols are more developed. Its relationship with the federal state is deeper.
The point is not that investors should ignore security concerns as it considers Mexican gas production. The point is that security should be treated as a serious operational challenge, not as a veto. If Mexico is going to reduce its dependence on US gas, strengthen its electricity system, support industrial growth, and potentially participate more seriously in global LNG markets, it will need to develop a more pragmatic approach to natural gas. That means private investment, regulatory certainty, environmental discipline, and a sober assessment of risk.
Mexico’s gas debate has often been trapped between two unhelpful extremes. On one side is the idea that natural gas development is environmentally and politically unacceptable. On the other is the assumption that insecurity makes serious investment impossible. Both arguments are too simple. Mexico needs more gas, has more gas, and knows more about managing energy-sector risk than its critics often acknowledge.
The Sheinbaum administration’s cautious turn toward domestic gas development should therefore be understood as more than a technical policy adjustment. It is an acknowledgment that energy sovereignty cannot be achieved through rhetoric alone. A country that imports most of the gas it consumes, while leaving much of its own resource base undeveloped, is not sovereign in any meaningful energy sense. The real test now is whether Mexico can move from recognition to implementation: creating the conditions under which private capital, public institutions, environmental safeguards, and security coordination can work together.
