Good News, Sort Of

Pemex has found a new oil field that is almost four times bigger than Cantarell, which has been the engine of the Mexican oil industry for more than a generation. The new field of approximately 140 billion barrels, which lies beneath Puebla and Veracruz, places Mexico among the three nations with the largest oil reserves in the world. The problem is, the technology to extract the oil is not available, neither in Mexico nor abroad. Nor will it be available for another three decades or so. This all makes a nice reminder of why oil production is more relevant than oil reserves.