https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/busin...s-oil.html

Quote:When Mexico gambled on ending decades of state control of its energy industry, officials said they hoped the move would promote investment and give the country access to technical expertise. That wager now appears to be paying off.

The government began auctioning off rights two years ago to drill in parts of the Gulf of Mexico. On Tuesday, an international consortium of energy companies said they had discovered a large oil field, and another firm said it had discovered more oil than expected in a separate area.

The overhaul of the Mexican oil and gas sector in recent years eventually ended the state energy company’s seven-decade domestic monopoly on exploration and production. The aim was to arrest years of declining oil output, blamed on a slow-moving public sector that lacked the technology to exploit opportunities in deep-sea drilling, or shale oil and gas.

The two announcements on Tuesday appeared to suggest that Mexico’s strategy, which was met with criticism when it was first pushed through, was succeeding.

The consortium, made up of Premier Oil of Britain, as well as Talos Energy of Texas and the Mexican company Sierra Oil and Gas, said that it had discovered a field containing more than one billion barrels of oil in shallow water 40 miles off the Mexican coast. Riverstone Holdings, an American private equity firm that specializes in energy investments, owns 45 percent of Talos Energy and 43 percent of Sierra Oil and Gas.

More and more economic pressure coming to countries in the Middle East, Russia and Venezuela. I'd bet foreign policy will become even more important moving forward - especially since the Saudi's and Iranians are getting clobbered by cheap oil. SA's gambit to put U.S. shale oil companies out of business backfired, and we're finding out that more and more oil is being discovered.

http://oilprice.com/Energy/Crude-Oil/OPE...Shale.html

Quote:In its just released latest market report for the month of July, OPEC admitted it has a problem: more than six months after the Vienna deal that was supposed to bring supply and demand in balance, the oil cartel confirmed it is pumping too much, not only in 2017, but that it was also set to produce too much oil in 2018, blaming shale production as the primary reason behind the oversupply.