Organized Crime and Investor Risk: Mexico LNG push faces mounting obstacles

A series of LNG projects proposed for Mexico’s Pacific Coast would turn the country into a major LNG exporter. But violence from drug cartels, political risk, and mounting costs could keep projects from moving forward.

(Ensenada, Baja California, Mexico) A plan to build as many as five major LNG export terminals on Mexico’s Pacific Coast could transform the country into a top-tier gas exporter.

But delays, rising costs, and a complex cocktail of political, security, and regulatory risk is stalling momentum, according to analysts. It remains unclear if the bullish export projections put forward by LNG developers will ever be realized.

The industry makes the case that exporting U.S. gas to Asia via Mexico is highly competitive for several reasons.

First, because Mexican LNG projects would have access to gas that is dirt cheap. Most of the feed gas needed to supply LNG terminals would not be produced in Mexico, but instead would largely be extracted from the prolific Permian basin in Texas and New Mexico.

For much of 2024, gas at the Waha hub — a regional pricing hub for gas in the Permian basin in West Texas — sold for prices that were near-zero or even in negative territory. When that gas finally arrives in Japan or Korea, it sells for around $10-$14 per MMBtu, or even higher during periods of crisis. Even after factoring in the couple of dollars needed for liquefaction and transport, the potential profit margin is huge.

More importantly, LNG exports from Mexico’s Pacific Coast would have 11 fewer days of travel time compared to the U.S. Gulf Coast. Shipments from Louisiana and Texas need to pass through the Panama Canal on the way to Asia. By comparison, the journey from Mexico is as much as 55 percent shorter,
shaving off $1/MMBtu in transit costs, according to Mexico Pacific Limited, the developer of the $15 billion Saguaro Energy LNG project in Sonora.

That would seem to give Mexican LNG projects an enormous advantage over other North American LNG projects. But the commercial case for Mexico LNG is murkier than it may seem, and the obstacles potentially insurmountable, multiple industry analysts told Gas Outlook.

Take Saguaro Energy LNG, a project to be built in the Mexican state of Sonora. The massive 15 million-tonne-per-annum (mtpa) project is being closely watched as a bellwether for the prospects of Mexico LNG writ large.

Whether or not the project is as competitive as the company says is “a hard question to answer,” Clark Williams-Derry, an energy finance analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told Gas Outlook. A lot depends on construction costs.

“They have to build a new pipeline. That’s a big expenditure. How long does that take? Are there going to be legal battles?”

Clark Williams-Derry, Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis

“In the [U.S. Gulf of Mexico] the gas supply is not exactly a given, but it’s close. If you want to build an intrastate pipeline, it’s pretty easy,” he said. “In Mexico, you’re building an international pipeline,” which is going to be more complex.

He pointed to Energía Costa Azul as a cautionary tale. Already under construction in Baja California, the small LNG project has seen delays and costs increases due to labour issues. In August 2024, Sempra Infrastructure, ECA’s owner, said the project’s completion would be delayed from the third quarter of 2025 until the second quarter of 2026, adding another $300 million in costs to the estimated $2 billion project. “We’re disappointed with the change in schedule,” Sempra CEO Jeffrey Martin said on a call with investors at the time.

For a small LNG project at brownfield site — formerly an LNG import terminal — that didn’t require an enormous cross-country pipeline, the problems in Baja raise some red flags.

A second and much larger phase of Energía Costa Azul, at 12 mtpa, is on the drawing board but its fate is unclear. Prospects for the expansion have taken a hit as the initial phase has seen delays and cost overruns. That doesn’t bode well for other Mexican LNG projects.

“The experience of Energía Costa Azul does raise questions about schedule slippage and cost, at a time when the rest of the entire world is building an unprecedented amount of LNG, which means it’s going to be harder to get the contractors,” Williams-Derry said.

Sempra Infrastructure did not respond to questions from Gas Outlook.

Organised crime and the Sierra Madre pipeline

But financial risks go beyond construction delays. For Saguaro LNG, project developer Mexico Pacific Limited needs to build an 800-km pipeline from its LNG site on the Gulf of California, across the Sonoran Desert to the U.S. border, where it will link up with another yet-to-be-built pipeline in the U.S. that runs to the Permian basin.

The Sierra Madre pipeline, as the Mexican portion of the pipeline is known, is probably the largest risk to the entire project, Ira Joseph, a senior research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told Gas Outlook.

“That pipeline is really kind of where all the risk is. [Mexico Pacific] has the contracts. They have relatively cheap gas. Commercially, they have everything in place,” he said. “But the pipeline risk is a thing. It is one of the last things before FID, but I’m not sure even after FID that the risk ever goes away because the security of the pipeline is going to be very, very difficult to maintain.”

“It’s a long pipeline and it goes through…not the most docile area of Mexico, shall we say? Everyone will want a piece of the action.”

Ira Joseph, Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University

He was referring to a sudden spike in violence from organised crime in Sonora and Sinaloa in the past year. Brazen murders between rival criminal organisations have paralysed cities like Culiacan, strangling the local economy. There are few signs that the violence is easing.

While some of the entities are drug cartels, much of the organised crime in Sonora at this point comes from extorting migrants and smugglers traveling north to the U.S. border, said Natalia Mendoza, a Sonora-based anthropologist.

“The violence is the worst that it has been since I’ve been working here for the last 20 years,” Mendoza told Gas Outlook. She said traveling on highways in Sonora, which has a military and police presence, can be done without too much concern, but driving on smaller roads is much more dangerous.

She said gas pipeline companies will need to have a plan for how they operate in areas rife with organized crime. However, she was not convinced that the violence would slow or stop the construction of the Sierra Madre pipeline. A previous gas pipeline in Sonora was built a decade ago without much incident.

“There isn’t anything intrinsic about a pipeline that the cartels would oppose. Sometimes I think that the opposite is true,” she said. “The fact that these territories are so fraught with violence, makes it easier for these big companies to come, because violence and organised crime inhibits social resistance.”

Criminal organisations control vast swathes of territory in Sonora. (Credit: Miguel Fernández de Castro)

Mendoza said she has wanted to travel to Puerto Libertad — where Saguaro LNG will be constructed —to learn more about how the gas export terminal might impact the fishing community there, but she’s reluctant to make the trip because of how dangerous it is to travel around the state. In such perilous conditions, an atmosphere of fear would make it nearly impossible for communities to mount meaningful opposition to the project.

She said energy and mining companies are rarely scared away by violence. They can hire private security that can negotiate with cartels or otherwise keep construction on track. If any violence occurs, it may not impact the bottom line. “Often it is not the company itself that suffers, but it’s the workers or the transport companies,” Mendoza said.

Historical examples offer some instructive context. The U.S. shale boom in the early 2010s led to a gas pipeline buildout in northeastern Mexico, connecting Texas’ Eagle Ford shale to the Mexican market. The construction bonanza in the state of Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico occurred alongside a massive wave of cartel violence.

“The construction of big business interests during the most violent years in that region — border infrastructure, roads, oil and gas pipelines — it didn’t stop,” Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University, told Gas Outlook. She authored a book, Los Zetas Inc, about drug cartels, organised crime, and the energy industry during that era.

She said it’s a “very interesting coincidence” that organised crime seems to continuously crop up in areas where there is a big influx of capital. “There’s a correlation, but I cannot allege causation,” she said.

In fact, she added, the desire for organised criminal groups to attack infrastructure or gas pipelines “is not logical” because it would bring unwanted attention from the state, which views such investments as strategic priorities.

Correa-Cabrera did not believe that the recent increase in violence in Sonora and Sinaloa would necessarily be a major detriment to the handful of proposed LNG projects. Violence “has never been a limit to profitable projects” in the past, she said. If the gas industry could rapidly expand in Tamaulipas during the early days of the shale revolution amidst horrific violence, there’s no reason to believe violence will slow down the gas expansion on Mexico’s Pacific Coast today.

Mexico Pacific did not respond to repeated inquiries by phone and email from Gas Outlook. But elsewhere, the company has downplayed security risks to the pipeline.

“When you look at LNG on a global basis, projects always have pipelines. So, this is not different in terms of risk profile when you look at other LNG projects and historically how things have been developed. It’s just simply different to the U.S. Gulf Coast,” Mexico Pacific’s CEO Sarah Bairstow told Hart Energy in November. “We feel very confident about that pipeline, particularly on the back of the routing and all the support that we’ve got from the [Sonora] government.”

Pressure on Gas Markets

Not only does the push for Mexican LNG rely on gas from the U.S., but many of the developers are American. Despite its name, Mexico Pacific, the company behind Saguaro Energy LNG, is headquartered in Texas.

Some of the customers for Saguaro Energy are also American companies (ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips, for instance). Aside from the project developer and its investors, the benefits of exports will accrue mostly to American gas producers in the Permian basin, who will enjoy higher prices for the gas they sell as they unlock access to Asian markets from the Pacific Coast of North America.

For all intents and purposes, the gas buildout on Mexico’s Pacific Coast is largely an American venture, an extension of the LNG building boom that has been unfolding in Texas and Louisiana in recent years. With the Gulf Coast increasingly crowded, the American gas industry and its investors are spreading out to farther-flung edges of the continent.

That is not to say that Mexico does not have a need for the gas — far from it. The Mexican economy is growing, and it has rising demand in a variety of sectors, including from a series of new gas-fired power plants, growing industry, and new data centres.

In November, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum outlined a $23 billion plan to build 13 gigawatts of new power plant capacity, from both renewables and gas, by 2030.

With rising domestic demand, LNG projects will “need to compete” for pipeline capacity with other sectors of the Mexican economy, Poten & Partners, a Texas-based LNG brokerage and consulting firm, wrote in a September report to clients.

“There’s a competition for molecules in Mexico,” Sergio Chapa, a senior LNG analyst at Poten & Partners, told Gas Outlook. “LNG exports are going have to compete with these other projects for those molecules, and for that pipeline capacity.”

“This next year is going to be very, very interesting in Mexico in terms of where natural gas goes and if they will build new pipelines,” Chapa said.

Competition for gas supply amongst various sectors of the economy could put upward pressure on prices, especially if Mexico succeeds in establishing itself as a top global LNG exporter.

This is quickly becoming an issue in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) warned in its high-profile LNG review in December that higher exports could raise domestic natural gas prices. That is occurring alongside an expected increase in gas used for new data centres.

While this tension exists in both countries, the difference is that Mexico relies on the U.S. for its gas supply.

As Mexico’s own production has declined and its consumption increases, import dependence continues to rise. A decade ago, Mexico relied on U.S. gas for about 40 percent of its needs. But by 2023, that soared to more than 70 percent of the gas it consumes.

“I think Mexican consumers are going to have the same concerns as U.S. consumers of gas, except maybe more so because they’re one step removed from U.S. consumers,” Ira Joseph from Columbia University said. “By 2030, 25 percent of U.S. gas production is going to be exported to either Mexico or exported in the form of LNG. That’s huge.”

He said North American prices will likely need to rise, while global prices will come down as the expected global wave of new LNG capacity hits the market in the next few years.

“If more money can be made on a netback basis to selling LNG overseas, the LNG plants — whether they’re in the U.S. or Mexico — are going to get filled first,” Joseph said.

Saguaro LNG, with a capacity of 15 mtpa, would be enormous. If completed, it alone would export the equivalent of one third of Mexico’s current gas imports from the U.S. And that is just the first phase; a second phase would double that volume.

Taken together, U.S. LNG exports and U.S. gas exports to Mexico via pipeline, “you’re looking at 32 or 33 bcf of natural gas per day that’s being produced in the U.S. that goes to the export market by 2027 or 2028,” Christopher Lenton, senior editor for Mexico and Latin America at Natural Gas Intelligence, said a the U.S.-Mexico Natural Gas Forum in San Antonio last November. By way of comparison, the U.S. produces a little over 100 bcf per day currently.

“That will be a serious driver of natural gas pricing and have direct implications in the market,” Lenton said.

“We foresee higher natural gas prices by the end of next year,” he added. “And that will be driven by more growth in LNG exports, as well as Mexico’s continued and increasing dependence on the U.S. for natural gas to power its electricity grid.”

Christopher Lenton, Mexico and Latin America at Natural Gas Intelligence

In the longer-term, there are questions about whether there will be sufficient supply in U.S. shale formations to feed all the new LNG terminals. Or, at least, enough supply at today’s low prices.

Some analysts are already warning that the best U.S. shale acreage has been picked over. “While low prices have certainly dampened drilling activity…price alone does not tell the full story. We posit that the shale gas basins are simply running out of high-quality drilling inventory,” Goehring & Rozencwajg, a research and investment firm, wrote in a commentary last year.

“Will higher prices fail to reverse the underlying depletion and arrest the production decline? We believe the answer is yes.”

Other analysts have voiced similar concerns. The Marcellus shale formation in Appalachia is the cheapest source of gas and holds abundant reserves, but it has limited pipeline capacity out of the region, which will put a ceiling on its production in the long run, according to McKinsey analyst Brandon Stackhouse.

“You’ve got all of this growth in Gulf Coast LNG, and you aren’t able to actually bring your cheapest source of supply down into the market,” Stackhouse said at the Gastech 2024 conference in Houston last September.

As a result, supplying the expected ramp-up in U.S. LNG capacity will require significantly higher prices in order to incentivise new production from other shale formations, he said.

But if you are a driller in the Permian basin, that’s precisely the point.

“One of the fundamental points of exports all along has been to raise Henry Hub prices,” Williams-Derry said. “This has been an explicit part of the strategy that the industry has used for years.”

He said the dramatic increase in LNG exports from the U.S., Canada, and Mexico increasingly links the North American market to the global market. “One of the results is that overseas consumers get cheaper gas, but also U.S. consumers pay more,” he said.

For American gas drillers, “that’s the goal.”

Heightened Political Risk

Both Mexico and the U.S. had presidential elections last year, which have resulted in a complex set of implications for the LNG industry. Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum came into office with large majorities in Congress, and her Morena party ushered in a highly controversial judicial reform that will lead to the direct election of judges. The Congress also voted to end independence for some national regulatory agencies.

The government claims the changes are needed to combat corruption and to improve government efficiency. There are vocal critics of both reforms, who have argued that they won’t address corruption and may undercut transparency. More broadly, critics fear Morena has become a hegemonic force in Mexican politics, and that the constitutional changes are ultimately an effort to dismantle institutional brakes on the party’s power.

How this impacts the investment climate for new LNG is unclear. But credit ratings agency Moody’s downgraded Mexico’s debt outlook in November from “stable” to “negative,” citing the “eroding checks and balances.” Investors are “unnerved,” as the FT put it in November.

The chill sent through the investor world from Mexico’s constitutional reforms is being downplayed by the Mexican government. President Sheinbaum spoke at a business summit October, where she reassured a group of 250 executives about the safety of their investments.

“We will promote public and private investment. I say it clearly: Rest assured that the investments of shareholders, both national and foreign, will be safe in our country,” Sheinbaum said at her inauguration.

Two weeks later, Sheinbaum hosted business leaders from both countries for an economic dialogue. In attendance was Mexico Pacific’s CEO Sarah Bairstow, who took a photo with Sheinbaum.

Sheinbaum’s government strongly supports the expansion of LNG, a point of continuity with her predecessor Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Mexico Pacific’s Bairstow told Hart Energy that she didn’t expect Saguaro LNG to be negatively impacted by the judicial reform in Mexico.

For Saguaro LNG, the critical missing piece of the puzzle is obtaining financing. The company is hoping to secure around $15 billion in financing from around 20 commercial banks and a syndicate of development banks (including several Mexican development banks), according to Natural Gas Intelligence. Santander, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group of Japan and JP Morgan Chase are advisors on the financing package.

But obtaining financing is “the weakest part of the project,” said Pablo Montaño from Conexiones Climaticas. “So far they are bluffing with money that they don’t have,” he said of Mexico Pacific.

Montaño said that the public-facing choreography is important for both Sheinbaum and for Mexico Pacific.

“Mexico’s government is trying to look secure, like a safe place for investment with all of these announcements of infrastructure projects,” he said. “The President of Mexico needs to claim investors are interested.”

For its part, Mexico Pacific is also eager to be seen in public with Sheinbaum because it will send a message to commercial banks who are skittish about lending billions of dollars for an LNG project saddled with security and political risk.

“Mexico Pacific needs to claim that they have the government on their side,” Montaño said.

“You need me to claim that I’m going to invest. I need you to look like you’re going to allow me to invest. That way I can get the money, and that way you can look like you have money coming from foreign investment,” he said, summing up a relationship of mutual need between Mexico Pacific and President Sheinbaum.

Meanwhile, a new source of instability has appeared north of the border. U.S. President Donald Trump imposed a 25 percent tariff on all goods coming into the country from Mexico and Canada, after previously delaying that trade offensive. After stock indices sharply sold off, he quickly offered an exemption to the auto sector.

He also has extensive plans for a crackdown on people at the border, making mass deportations a central pillar of his 2024 campaign. And Trump has threatened a more forceful policy towards Mexican drug cartels.

In February, the Trump administration labelled a series of Latin American gangs as “terrorist organizations,” including Mexico’s two largest, the Jalisco New Generation and Sinaloa cartels. This move was opposed by big business groups in both countries because organised crime in Mexico has deeply penetrated many sectors of the economy. The terrorist designation would impose serious criminal penalties on a person or entity doing business with those groups, even if unwittingly. That includes financial institutions. Experts believe it could have a massive chilling effect on investment.

During his presidential campaign, Trump even suggested that the U.S. could take unilateral military action in Mexico. In February, the New York Times reported that the C.I.A. has conducted secret drone surveillance flights over Mexican territory.

Sheinbaum warned that she would never accept an “invasion” of Mexican territory.

Undoubtedly, these policies will be highly damaging to the U.S.-Mexico relationship, but much depends on whether or not Trump decides to escalate his campaign into a full-blow confrontation. Sheinbaum has gone to great lengths to keep the relationship from going off the rails while also remaining firm on protecting Mexican sovereignty. But significant damage has already been done.

What does all of this mean for LNG? There are reasons to believe that the impact on energy trade will be modest. Trump has aggressively supported the LNG industry, and more gas sales to Mexico would be consistent with his strategy of v to buy more American oil and gas in exchange for avoiding tariffs. The U.S. oil and gas industry donated millions of dollars to his campaign, and in turn, he has stacked his cabinet with friends of the industry. His Secretary of Energy is the CEO of a Colorado-based oilfield services company.

Still, an escalating trade war is one more factor injecting turmoil into the prospects for the LNG build-out on Mexico’s Pacific Coast.

It is a “worrying sign” and adds more risk and uncertainty to LNG projects already saddled with a lot of both, said Alex Munton, director of Global Gas & LNG Service at the Rapidan Energy Group, a Washington-based energy analysis firm.

Speaking to Gas Outlook prior to Trump’s inauguration, Munton said the tariff threat is like a “hand grenade” that has been tossed into the U.S.-Mexico relationship. Even if the likelihood of a cutoff of gas flows is very low, there’s no telling what might get used as points of leverage during trade and security negotiations between the two countries.

“It’s not the kind of environment that you would want as an investor,” Munton said. “I think investors will be wary about pulling the trigger on multi-billion-dollar investments until there’s greater stability in U.S.-Mexico relations.”

Some industry analysts do not view politics as having a meaningful impact on major LNG investments in Mexico. “Any problems for these export projects are structurally commercial, and has very little to do with politics,” Sergio Chapa from Poten & Partners, a Texas-based LNG brokerage and consulting firm, told Gas Outlook before Trump took office. “If it’s a good project with strong economic returns and good prices for customers, it’ll get built.”

But it’s conceivable that a sudden deterioration in U.S.-Mexican relations could spoil the economics of Saguaro LNG and other prospective LNG projects in Mexico.

Mexico gas supply (MMSCFD)

Mexico relies on the U.S. for roughly 70% of its gas supply. Increasing exports to these proposed levels could jeopardize its own energy security.

Fitch Ratings warned that Mexico’s reliance on U.S. gas is increasing, which “exposes the country to exchange-rate volatility and supply disruptions amid increasing uncertainties over bilaterial trade relations.” A weakening currency, extreme weather, or a trade war could affect the supply of gas flowing south into Mexico.

“A more permanent disruption could also derail the economics of newly built LNG infrastructure,” Fitch said.

Saguaro’s momentum stalled?

There is clearly commercial interest in LNG from the west coast of Mexico. Mexico Pacific has inked deals with customers for nearly all of the capacity of Phase 1 of Saguaro LNG.

“Our project, beyond building out further energy security in Asia, is really about building out Mexico as a key LNG exporter,” Mexico Pacific’s CEO Sarah Bairstow said at Gastech in Houston last September. “We really believe that there is more room than for just our project. This is a true opportunity for Mexico to export around 70 million tonnes over the coming decades, which would make them the fourth largest exporter in the world.”

But the threat of cartel violence in Sonora, unknown construction costs, and political risk are combining to throw the project’s financing into doubt.

“They are basically fully sold out, which is a great achievement, but where they haven’t made anything like as much progress is on the financing side. And that’s really what’s going to make or break this project,” Munton said.

He said it’s typical to see lenders finance 70 percent of the project, but not the entire amount. They’d normally want the remaining portion to be equity investments from partners in the project.

He pointed to the example of Rio Grande LNG, in south Texas, which is roughly similar in size to Saguaro. The final investment package for Rio Grande LNG came in at more than $18 billion, much higher than initially expected. The company’s stock dropped sharply when that cost figure was made public.

For that project, equity investors covered $6 billion of the total financing.

Munton says the inability thus far for Saguaro to find equity partners to cover even a portion of the price tag is a sign of trouble.

“That’s sort of [the] scale of the challenge that Saguaro faces. You’ve got an LNG plant, which is going to cost between $15 and $20 billion.”

“There’s no real means by which they can drive those costs down. West Mexico does not have a cost advantage over [the] U.S. Gulf Coast. It’s on par, or if anything, more expensive, just because of the sort of logistical operational challenges.”

“You need some big players with big pockets to participate. And it’s not clear where that equity component is going to come from,” he said.

Customers for Saguaro LNG’s gas shipments include several oil majors, including Shell, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, and Australia’s Woodside. While they are willing to buy Saguaro’s gas — if it ever becomes available — they are so far not willing to invest in the project itself.

Notably, all four have taken equity positions in other LNG projects around North America — Shell in Canada, and the other three in separate projects on the U.S. Gulf of Mexico.

“You’ve got a group of companies that are the biggest energy companies in the world,” Munton said. “But none of them, clearly, see Saguaro as an attractive equity investment. They clearly do not want to get involved with Saguaro to that extent.

Alex Munton, Rapidan Energy Group

He said another red flag for the commercial momentum of Saguaro is that negotiations over the engineering, procurement, and construction (EPC) contract have stalled, which likely suggests the estimated construction costs are too high.

“The project is kind of collapsing on itself through these multiple layers of risk, which essentially all come back to this fundamental question, which is: how do you convince a group of financiers to provide north of $20 billion in capital?” Munton said.

“Mexico Pacific doesn’t have the money. They’re just a development company that is out there trying to secure investment to make it happen. But there’s a lot to do.”

Bairstow has said Mexico Pacific expects to take FID in early 2025, and an FID on the second phase — also to be 15 mtpa — could come 12 months later. But Munton said there are few concrete signs that the company can successfully stick to this timeline. Without progress on the financing package or an EPC contract, FID is likely not imminent.

Mexico Pacific did not respond to questions from Gas Outlook about the project’s commercial obstacles.

To complicate matters further, Mexico Pacific has a permit authorisation from the U.S. Department of Energy to export U.S.-based gas, but that permit expires in December 2025. DOE can issue an extension, but its current policy dictates that the project must already be under construction and must also demonstrate extenuating circumstances for why it needs more time. As it stands, Saguaro can’t meet either of those criteria.

Conceivably, the Trump administration could change that policy, but for now, the prospect of Saguaro LNG’s permit expiring and the project having to file a new application and start over in the permitting queue is one more significant headwind for the project. The clock is ticking, and Munton said that the first six months of 2025 will be “make or break time” for Saguaro LNG.

By late February, an industry trade publication reported that the project is beginning to fall apart. The private equity owner of Mexico Pacific is exploring a sale of the company.

With the fortunes of Saguaro LNG up in the air, that raises questions about the entire notion of Mexico ever becoming a major gas exporter.

If Saguaro LNG went forward, along with Sempra Energy’s Energía Costa Azul Phase 2, and Sempra’s Vista Pacifico, then total Mexican export capacity from the Pacific Coast could top 30 mtpa. Other projects on the drawing board would add even more capacity.

“It could be really, really big,” Munton said. “But it’s going to be difficult getting there.”

Writing by Nicholas Cunningham, editing by Sophie Davies.