Growing pains ahead for Mexico's reforms

Regulators have won high praise from the industry for progress to date, but the oil opening is still in its early days and fresh obstacles lie ahead

After a rocky start, Mexico's oil reforms have gathered pace, with a series of successful bid rounds capped off by a major shallow-water discovery this summer by Houston-based Talos Energy. The find vindicated much of what the reformers had argued all along. Talos and its partners not only brought fresh capital into Mexico, it also brought fresh ideas. Armed with the same geological data Pemex has been sitting on for years, Talos looked afresh at the area off Tabasco State and spotted the Zama prospect, which initial drilling has shown could hold as much as 2bn barrels of crude, one of the industry's largest finds this decade. But the discovery comes with a hitch—one that points to the next