The heroic management of Pemex: 240 problems, 65 solutions (mathematics is not his thing)
It seems that at Petróleos Mexicanos they have adopted a novel management philosophy: that of selective attention. While you worry about separating garbage, the state company has decided to leave the overwhelming majority of the environmental risks associated with its facilities unaddressed. The reason? Who knows, maybe they were too busy counting the billions they don’t invest in maintenance.
According to a presentation he made to investors – an audience that no doubt loves to hear about potential disasters – of the total inventory of 240 registered environmental risks, a staggering number of 65 have been addressed. For non-arithmetic experts, that equates to 27%. The remaining 73%, that uncomfortable majority, enjoy various states of abandonment: 62 are “in process” (a concept as vague as it is promising), four are waiting for someone to sign a contract, 63 have a work plan for subsequent years (read: “never”) and 46 do not even have a program assigned. An enviable efficiency.
Priorities and spills: When the earth moves more than the company
While Pemex was preparing these colorful presentations, life, impertinent, insisted on proving him right. The company faces a contingency due to a hydrocarbon spill in the north of Veracruz. The official cause: heavy rains. Because, of course, in a tropical country like Mexico, rainfall is a totally unpredictable meteorological event and unrelated to any prevention plan.
To address this feast of ecological dangers, an investment of 15,460 million pesos has been estimated. A figure that sounds solid until one remembers that it is still just an estimate on paper, not real money moving to clean soil, water and air.
In front of the deputies, the director of Pemex, Víctor Rodríguez Padilla, offered a speech that mixed resignation with self-absolution. He acknowledged that it is a high-risk industry, but assured that he had a culture of care. “Inevitably,” he said, as if the burst pipelines were a divine design and not the result of decades of industrial neglect and disinvestment in infrastructure. His priority, he stated, is human life. It’s a shame that the environment, that system on which human life depends, seems to be a secondary concern.
He recounted the Veracruz episode with the epic of a Greek tragedy: a large oil pipeline, an earth movement, a pipe that burst and a spill that, with enviable determination, was channeled through a stream until it flowed into the Tuxpan River. At least one and a half million liters of hydrocarbon were recovered. Is it a lot or a little? It depends on whether what was spilled was one million six hundred thousand liters or ten million.
The national landscape: A tapestry of contaminated sites
But let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that the problem is only 240 points on a map. Julio Valdivieso, former president of the College of Environmental Engineers, enlightens us with an even more bleak perspective: in reality there are more than 20 thousand sites contaminated by hydrocarbons in the country. Serving 65 out of 20,000 is like trying to dry the ocean with a dropper. Valdivieso points out, with overwhelming logic, that the oil company does not even have the money to pay its suppliers, so dreaming of comprehensive environmental remediation is nothing short of a fantasy.
The specialist Juan Carlos Machorro finishes off the move by attributing this debacle to the six-year mismanagement of the company. And now, in a tragicomic twist, the company is opening up to private investment. But the same director warns that we should not expect to see it as profitable, but rather with a “social focus.” A wonderful euphemism that could be translated as: “We are going to continue polluting, but with a smile and without being accountable to shareholders.” The conclusion is that the ecological disaster and the lack of maintenance are the parastatal’s most enduring legacy.
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