The Road To Mexico .... Merges With The Road To Venezuela -- August 26, 2018

It doesn't a rocket scientist to see where Mexico's socialist president is going to take the country. Unless I'm missing something, AMLO is going to do the same thing to Mexico that Maduro did to Venezuela. Headline over at oilprice: Mexico's new president (AMLO) to deal blow to oil industry.

AMLO has two goals:

• reduce his country's dependence on gasoline from the US
• increase crude oil production

The graph might be a big difficult to read. The best way to read it is to look at the "2016" debacle first; then look at "2017" with wild volatility; and the look at "2018" and "projected 2018" -- all lines trend down ... from 2.6 million bopd in early 2016 to now about 2.1 million bopd now. The floor appears to be 2.0 million bopd.

This is actually a whole lot easier to read, from tradingeconomics:

It will be interesting to see if putting the "old" Pemex back in control will reverse the downturn.

Mexico’s oil production has been declining for over a decade, falling to 1.9 million barrels per day recently, down from 3.4 mb/d in the mid-2000s. The IEA sees output falling by another 130,000 bpd this year, due to the aging offshore oil fields, although that is a narrower decline compared to the 235,000 bpd the country lost last year.

AMLO is aiming to boost production by 600,000 bpd over the next two years, which will be a monumental task. If he is to succeed, AMLO is betting that Pemex will lead the way.

Back in January, 2018, oilprice saw "light at the end of the tunnel." It appears that this will all come undone over the next two years. 

Now, gasoline.

AMLO wants $2.6 billion to rehabilitate Mexico’s six aging oil refineries, plus more than $8 billion to build a new refinery from scratch. The idea is to cut down or even eliminate gasoline imports from the United States.

My hunch: if he gets support to rehabilitate the aging oil refineries there will be huge cost overruns. A new refinery? Not going to happen.

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Sunday Evening

Sophia got out the chess game, but she only set up the pieces. She is pretty good at getting all the pieces in the correct location, but she doesn't yet know how to play the game.

We had just come in from swimming -- 94 degrees today. I did not realize my hair had thinned out so much on top.