On March, almost half a year after the official regulations on the matter were repealed, Secretary of Environment and Natural Resources Juan Jose Guerra Abud published an “Environmental Criteria Guide to Regulate Fracking1 in Mexico”. Following that path, earlier in April, the Environmental and Energetic Security Agency2 (ASEA, for its acronym in Spanish), announced that for 2016 a regulatory framework for the hydraulic fracturing technique would be issued. The planning regulation constitutes a positive step to set the ground for exploration and production of shale fuels in the country and will give legal certainty on the Mexican standards to national and international actors involved in the energetic industry.
The main inputs of these new regulations are Peña Nieto’s Energetic Reform, recently applauded by President Obama, and the federal rules issuedby the Obama administration on the matter. The latter was unveiled on March 20 and became the first major federal regulation on hydraulic fracturing, a technique for oil and gas drilling that has led to a significant increase in American energy production, but has also raised concerns about health and safety risks. Fracking has been known since the 1940s, nonetheless; only in the last ten years has there been a “fracking boom” that puts the U.S. on track to soon become the world’s largest oil and gas producer.
Despite the current, and hopefully temporary decrease on global oil prices, more complicated and expensive methods, like fracking, have now become attractive and profitable to all oil and gas producers. Despite the fact that natural gas is less pollutant than coal when burned, environmentalists fear that the technique, which involves injecting a cocktail of chemicals deep underground to break up the rocks around oil and gas deposits, could contaminate surrounding water supplies and wildlife.
This dichotomy is the main reason why fracking needs to be regulated. When properly employed, the technique offers one way in the short or medium term for meeting the global demand for lower-cost high-quality energy. Nevertheless, the long-term consequences of fracking are still unforeseeable hence, the Mexican legal preparation must not be underestimated neither by entrepreneurs, that will invest given the opening of the sector, nor the environmentalists.
The Mexican Secretary of Environment’s guidelines are currently working as the provisional legal framework until the ASEA’s regulations for 2016 are issued; both are pretending to enable shale fuels projects to start in Mexico as soon as possible. According to them, around 2 to 7 million gallons of water could be used during the drilling of a single site and fracking projects would not be allowed in areas where water is scarce (Cervantes, 2015). The Ministry’s document recognizes that fracking, if not abide to environmental norms, can lead to competition for the availability of water and pollute the land and water resources (Pianagua, 2015). Organizations concerned with the negative impacts of fracking in the environment such as Alianza Contra el Fracking (Alliance Against Fracking) have warned that the Ministry’s guidelines are non-binding and only used among the authorities. Nevertheless, they fill up the legal void left by the former official normativity before the definite regulation on fracking is issued.