As long as there is war, the price of oil will stay high. Airplanes, trucks, tanks and whatever else uses the fuel do so at such an alarming rate that there is no reason for oil companies to reduce prices. When the wars around the world end, the oil prices will come down. Reducing one's travel will have absolutely no impact on world crude oil prices.
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Pemex's ability to control its own investment capital is probably more important to its success than anything else. The firm, though, has been hobbled because the government keeps all profits for use in the federal budget and the finance ministry has the final word on all Pemex investments. Solving that problem would require distancing government from the oil company. Given that the government is dependent on Pemex cash, that is politically risky. In fact, the real foundation for Calderon's reforms announced last week actually happened long ago when he first took office and spearheaded an effort to change Mexico's tax system. Much of the Mexican economy doesn't pay taxes to the government, which explains why its need for cash from Pemex is particularly desperate. Those tax reforms, however, are too modest to make a fundamental difference in the government's dependence on Pemex.
Calderon's reforms seem unlikely to solve the politically hardest task: reigning in the Pemex workers' union, which favors projects that generate jobs and benefits for its members. The union is well-connected to Mexico's left-leaning political parties, which helps explain why those same parties are so wary of "privatization." In fact, Calderon's proposals would not privatize the companies, but the union and the left know that cry will rally the people to prevent change.
Elsewhere in the world a thicket of similar, interlocking problems loom over the oil patch. Kuwait has a procurement system much like Mexico's, with a similarly perverse effect on the incentives for workers in that country's oil company to take risks and perform at world standard. Even in Brazil, whose state oil company is one of the best performing, has a hard time keeping the government at bay when it comes to taxing oil output. Two massive new oil finds over the last six months have kindled discussions in Brazil about raising the tax rate and channeling ever more of the oil output for government purposes. In Venezuela, where Chavez has taken a good oil company and run it into the ground, the burden of public projects is so great that the oil company can no longer focus on actually producing oil efficiently, and production is in decline.
The odds are that Calderon will make some reforms but won't transform Pemex. And that outcome, multiplied through state-owned oil companies around the world, suggests that oil output will increase only sluggishly. With demand still strong, oil prices are set to stay high for some time.
Victor is professor of law at Stanford University's Program on Energy & Sustainable Development and adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
© 2008
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