Mexico: energy produced with natural gas is clean; activists see deception

The Mexican energy regulator included in the electric power category “clean” and “fuel free” to that produced with natural gas, which has been criticized by activists as a “deception” to fictitiously try to achieve the country’s environmental commitments.

In an extensive document published on Friday in the Official Gazette (DOF), the Energy Regulatory Commission (CRE) announced modifications to several standards related to calculations to measure the efficiency of cogeneration systems and the percentages of free energy from fuels.

In a section of the published agreement, the CRE says that “it will be considered clean electric energy” the one that takes advantage of the residual heat of a system that has used natural gas or cleaner fuels.

In another new section, the CRE specifies that the “fuel free energy” will be the additional electrical energy generated by a plant that uses natural gas and is the product of a type of cooling technology.

Until now, natural gas had been considered a fuel for the energy transition towards renewable sources, but not a source of clean energy.

Environmentalists raised their voices after the formalization of the legal changes in the DOF -which had been approved this week by the governing body of the CRE- saying that the regulator endorses processes and fuels that produce pollutants, are a health risk and contribute to global warming.

“With the proposed changes, the world would be made to believe that our country is increasing the percentage of renewable energies in our energy matrix when in reality it is not.”, said four environmental organizations, including Greenpeace, in a joint statement.

“This new agreement will not add a single megawatt (MW) of renewable energy capacity to our electrical matrix or reduce a single additional ton of carbon dioxide.”, added the statement.

The General Law on Climate Change establishes the commitment to reach at least 35% of electricity generated from clean sources by 2024.

The government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has put a brake on a greater presence of private and foreign renewable energy companies and has instead sought to favor the state generator, CFE, which produces most of its energy from fossil sources. .

López Obrador, a nationalist in energy matters, has tried to reverse a profound reform that completely opened the sector to private capital and aimed at making state companies, CFE and the oil company Pemex, more players in the market.

But the president assures that the reform, carried out between 2013 and 2014, weakened CFE and Pemex to, over time, make them disappear, and he has proposed Mexico’s energy self-sufficiency as a matter of national sovereignty.

Source: EFE