How Mexico slipped into a lethal natural gas dependency
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For a short while, Mexico was very much in the business of having its cake and eating it too. Fracking, the process of hydraulically fracturing certain rock formations to extract natural gas, was long frowned upon by the government. Just across the border, in Texas’ Permian Basin, the slogan was “drill baby drill.” It turned the US into the world’s biggest exporter of natural gas—structurally damaged and polluted communities be fracked!
The intense production made US gas imports seven times cheaper than the Asian and Australian stuff in Mexico. US imports even outcompeted domestic production. Today 96% of Mexico’s liquid natural gas (LNG) imports come from the US.
In what feels like a million years ago, this was meant to be a good thing.
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