By THE PULSE NEWS MEXICO STAFF

As part of his plan to make Mexico more economically solvent and reduce the national debt, newly instated President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) said Saturday, Dec.15, that he will boost the country’s crude oil production by 45 percent by the year 2025.

Speaking before a crowd of supporters in the oil-rich city of Ciudad del Carmen, in the southwestern Mexican state of Campeche, AMLO said the the state-run oil company Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) will over the course of the next seven years increase its daily production to 2.4 million barrels a day.

Currently, Mexico produced 1.65 million barrels per day.

By investing 75 million pesos in updating equipment and expanding technology, AMLO said that Mexico would focus on extracting from known reserves, rather than in exploring new fields.

With proven reserves of 10 billion barrels, Mexico was the seventh-largest oil producer in the world during the mid-2000s, producing 3.25 million barrels of crude oil a day.

But in 2007, oil production dropped off dramatically to below 3 million barrels a day, and by 2008, Pemex was barely pumping out 2.8 million barrels a day.

As a result, Pemex was left with insufficient capital to develop new resources on its own, leading to the September 2007 Energy Reform by former President Enrique Peña Nieto, intended to attract foreign capital to the industry.

Nevertheless, Pemex’s finances have remained in the red.

AMLO has suggested that he will reverse the Energy Reform.

So far, he has not officially done that, but he did announced that all oil tenders will be suspended for at least three years, until private companies in Mexico can show that they are investing and producing more oil and gas.