HOUSTON -- Hydrocarbons make up 60% of the human energy consumption worldwide. That sounds like a lot until you consider that in Mexico, hydrocarbons make up 90% of energy consumption – and 60% of that is dedicated to oil alone.

“We tend to think that the big reservoirs contribute mostly to our electricity production, but really what accounts for the increase in production in the last decade has been an increase in generation using gas,” said Carlos Morales-Gil, general director of Pemex Exploration and Production. “That is something that we have to take very seriously given the huge contribution that hydrocarbons make to energy consumption.”

Morales-Gil, who spoke to a standing-room-only, early-morning crowd at OTC 2013 recently, added that hydrocarbon production also makes up about 30% of Mexico’s federal income.

The topic of the presentation was “Moving Toward Sustainability in the Mexican Petroleum Industry,” and Morales-Gil outlined how Pemex is working to make production, and the human element in the industry, more sustainable.

Production

The company developed a four-point strategic plan to grow its asset base, increase operational efficiency, modernize management, and adhere to corporate responsibility after having learned the lessons of reserve replacement the hard way.

With a huge reserve base, Pemex halted exploration in the’90s. “That put us in a very critical situation of nonsustainability given the fact that we were not only not replacing the reserves, but that we were consuming the reserves,” Morales-Gil said. “We were having negative ratios on reserve replacement.”

The company started exploration once again in 2004, aiming to diversify assets.

In 2009 Pemex reached a 100% replacement level on its reserves, Morales-Gil said, but the company still wants to increase the reserve replacement rate, the exploration success rate and recovery factors during the next four years.

“We are exploring where we know the resources are,” Morales-Gil said. That includes the southeastern basins, which have produced 45 Bbbl of the 55 Bbbl of oil recovered by Pemex over the past 75 years, and the Tampico-Misantla region.

“We still have 25 billion barrels of reserves in those basins,” Morales-Gil said. That includes 20 billion barrels in conventional resources in the southeastern basins alone.

Though the main activity is taking place in the southeast, the company is exploring gas resources in the northern part of the country and unconventional resources in Tampico-Misantla.

In addition, there are 26 Bbbl to be unlocked in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. Pemex’s Maximo-1 and PEP-1 are being drilled at a depth of 3,000 m (9,580 ft) below sea level and will be among the 10 deepest offshore wells in the world.

“If we do not go to deep water, then we have to let go of half of the resources that we can find in the future,” he said.

Human sustainability

“All of our projects need, essentially, three things: people, investment and technology. The most important one is people, because with good people technology will come. And if you have the resources, you can get the money. People are the critical factor,” Morales-Gil said.

He went on to say that for a long time Pemex “didn’t follow a recruitment policy that allowed us to capture the talent that we needed,” and thus did not recruit.

Now, the company has a recruitment policy that includes going to universities to “capture the talent.” The company has also implemented integrated training programs that include workshops, mentoring, and graduate studies. More than 40 people in the company are currently working toward a master’s degree, and 15 are working on a doctorate. The program allows the company to foster talent within its own ranks, Morales-Gil said.