No quick fix for Pemex

The government may have been forced to scale back its upstream ambitions. But even the revised targets might be too much, too soon

Pemex will struggle to meet its upstream goals in 2021. Worse still, against volatile commodity prices, looming debt maturities and years of negative free cash flow, the Mexican NOC faces an uphill battle to avoid adding to its huge $105bn debt pile. Financially strained Pemex had already been forced to downgrade its 2021 output target. In December, the producer revised the figure down by 125,000bl/d, to just over 1.94mn bl/d. But even reaching this target looks doubtful. In November, average output for 2020 was shy of 1.69mn bl/d, indicating a further 258,000bl/d would be needed to make up the shortfall. “We believe the upstream goal is quite ambitious and will be difficult to reach”