Iced Texas pipelines cause Mexico outage
Freezing weather in Texas led to a chain of events that left almost 5 million customers in Mexico without power Monday as a shortage of natural gas disrupted electricity production.
Mexico’s government-owned utility, the Federal Electricity Commission, said its operations were left short as the winter storm in Texas froze natural gas pipelines.
Mexico uses gas to generate about 60 percent of its power, compared with about 40 percent in the United States.
Mexico built pipelines to take advantage of cheap natural gas from the U.S., often obtained by fracking in Texas. Mexico does not allow fracking in its own territory.
The utility said U.S. electricity demand also rose as temperatures plunged across the border, leading to much higher prices. It said gas prices had risen from about $3 per million British thermal units to as much as $600 in recent days.
The commission said that by midday Monday it had restored power to about 65 percent of the 4.8 million customers affected by the blackout, mainly in the northern border states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. A smaller number of users were also affected in Durango and Zacatecas.
The utility’s director of fuel purchasing, Miguel Reyes Hernandez, suggested that what happened in Texas was a perfect storm of factors that choked off imports of gas that Mexico uses to run many of its power plants.
“Electricity demand in the United States rose by a little over 20 percent in just four days,” Reyes Hernandez said. “The increase was due precisely to the drop in temperatures, and obviously the use of heating in the United States meant an increase in natural gas demand on the one hand, and precisely because of the low temperatures, there was a decrease in renewable energy.”
He said U.S. wind turbines “had their blades frozen. … And there was freezing in many pipelines and even at wells.”
It was the latest embarrassing failure for the commission, which has become a pet project for President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.