Mexico's Dependence on US Natural Gas and the Strategic Risk Ahead of the USMCA 2026 Review

When 75% of Mexico's natural gas crosses a single border, energy policy and foreign policy cease to be separate conversations. That dependence, acknowledged publicly by President Claudia Sheinbaum in March 2026, places Mexico in an unusual position among G-20 emerging economies: a country with its own hydrocarbon reserves that imports most of the fuel sustaining its electrical grid. The question worth analyzing is not whether the dependence exists, but what room for maneuver Mexico has to manage it before the USMCA review formally gets underway in 2026.

The True Scale of the Link

In 2025, Mexico set a new all-time record for natural gas imports from the United States. US Energy Information Administration (EIA) records show that US exports to Mexico have grown steadily over the past eight years, driven by the shale gas boom in the Permian Basin and the construction of cross-border pipelines. El Financiero reported that Mexico broke records for US natural gas imports in 2025, against a backdrop of rising electricity generation demand from both the industrial sector and nearshoring-linked supply chains.

Mexico's natural gas market has three layers: domestic production by Pemex (currently at low levels due to declining mature fields), pipeline imports from Texas and other southern US states, and an incipient liquefied natural gas (LNG) market still marginal in the national energy balance. In practice, the dominant layer is the second. Without it, the Mexican power system, which relies on gas for approximately half of its installed capacity, would face severe supply constraints.

Three Risk Vectors Ahead of the USMCA Review

The USMCA review activated in 2026 is not an automatic renegotiation; it is a review clause that can lead to substantive changes if any party requests them. On the energy front, the gas-electricity nexus makes Mexico a structural demandeur negotiating from a position of heavy supply dependence. Three vectors concentrate the risk.

Market Power and Transfer Pricing

Mexico has no significant natural gas storage capacity. That means any interruption in flows from the US, whether from extreme weather events, pipeline maintenance, or regulatory decisions on the American side, transmits almost in real time to the national electrical grid. In a trade negotiation, that operational vulnerability narrows the margin to hold positions on other chapters of the treaty, including those related to investment, competition, and intellectual property.

Tariffs and Cross-Conditionalities

Sector analysts warn that the USMCA review may bring cross-pressures: chapters that appear unrelated to energy, such as labor standards, automotive rules of origin, or intellectual property, could become informally linked to energy cooperation. According to Mexico Business News, the energy chapter is one of the focal points heading into the USMCA review, given the weight the bilateral gas relationship has acquired over the past decade.

Supply Security in the Face of Extreme Events

The winter of February 2021, when Texas's power system collapsed during Storm Uri, triggered gas cutoffs that directly affected northern Mexico's states. The event demonstrated that the shared supply chain has a single point of failure. Mexico still lacks the storage capacity that would give it operational autonomy in a similar event, making supply security a matter of structural negotiation rather than technical operations.

The Institutional Response: SENER and the Storage Policy

In 2025 and 2026, the Ministry of Energy (SENER) published two key instruments to address this gap. The first is the Public Policy on Natural Gas Storage, which establishes for the first time a regulatory framework aimed at incentivizing the construction of storage facilities on national territory. The second is a natural gas infrastructure strategy through 2030, with an investment horizon that includes expansion of the pipeline network, LNG receiving terminals, and backup capacity.

Both instruments acknowledge, in their own terms, the diagnosis the data confirms. President Sheinbaum stated it directly: "Mexico depends 75% on natural gas from the United States." The statement, cited by Expansión, sets the starting point for an institutional agenda that seeks to gradually rebalance that share without disrupting the supply that sustains current demand.

The storage policy is the newest element on the board. Unlike pipelines, which take years to build and require cross-border coordination, underground or tank storage can be developed on national territory under Mexican regulation. Countries such as Germany and Japan use strategic gas storage as a buffer against disruptions; Mexico had until now lacked the regulatory framework that would make that investment financially viable for the private sector.

CFE and Long-Term Contracts: A Double Reading

The Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is the central actor in Mexico's gas market, both as a direct buyer for its generation plants and as administrator of the pipeline network that distributes the fuel to third parties. Its long-term contracts with US suppliers and transporters create supply certainty, but also consolidate structural dependence: the main operator's incentives are aligned with continuous flows from the US, not with diversifying sources in the short term.

According to Mexico Business News, Mexico faces a natural gas crossroads heading into 2026: the same pipeline infrastructure that enabled nearshoring expansion also anchors the country to a single supplier. Investing in storage and LNG regasification capacity, which can be sourced from Qatar, Trinidad and Tobago, or other Atlantic producers, would diversify the origin of gas without necessarily reducing import volumes in the short term.

There is also an underlying institutional tension. CFE operates under a universal supply mandate; strategic storage requires private investment that SENER's public policy seeks to incentivize. Aligning both logics, the state operator's and the private investor's, is the institutional engineering that will determine whether the published frameworks translate into real infrastructure before the USMCA review concludes its work.

The International Reference: What Other Dependent Importers Did

Germany is the most documented case of extreme gas dependence and its subsequent management. Before 2022, it imported more than 55% of its gas from a single supplier. The disruption accelerated a strategy that included floating LNG terminals deployed in under nine months, supply contracts with Norway, Qatar, and Nigeria, and mandatory storage standards equivalent to 90 days of national consumption.

Japan, for its part, built the world's largest LNG regasification capacity precisely because it was a total importer, with no relevant domestic production. Its model rests on long-term bilateral contracts with diversified producers, redundant terminals, and strategic reserves equivalent to thirty days of electricity consumption.

Neither country eliminated external dependence; they managed it by converting it into operational resilience. Mexico has favorable geophysical conditions: saline aquifers in the north and salt structures on the Gulf coast that could house underground storage, plus a geographical position that facilitates access to Atlantic and Pacific LNG producers, options that Mediterranean or Central European countries do not have to the same extent.

Toward an Architecture of Energy Resilience

The 75% dependence on US natural gas will not reverse itself with a decree or a single investment cycle. It is the result of decades of infrastructure decisions that will remain economically rational and operationally necessary for nearshoring electricity demand for at least the next ten years. The realistic horizon is not energy autarky but resilience: reducing operational vulnerability without dismantling the integration that drives the economy.

Four concrete actions define that horizon and are compatible with the existing bilateral relationship.

The first: advance implementation of SENER's Storage Policy with quantified targets. A capacity equivalent to a minimum of 15 days of national consumption as a verifiable target for 2030, with clear tax incentives for the private sector and oversight mechanisms from the CRE.

The second: activate the LNG framework so that CFE and private actors can sign supply contracts with non-US suppliers, starting with regasification terminals in the Gulf of Mexico, which is the fastest diversification route and does not require new cross-border infrastructure.

The third: incorporate energy security as an explicit axis in Mexico's USMCA negotiating position. Shared infrastructure commitments, pipelines, storage, and electrical interconnections, can form part of the energy chapter of the renewed treaty, with resilience clauses for extreme weather events.

The fourth: establish a SENER-CFE-CRE coordination mechanism so that CFE's long-term contracts include progressive diversification clauses without compromising short-term supply security.

The USMCA review is, in this sense, an opportunity to convert a dependence that today operates as a structural vulnerability into an integration that tomorrow functions as a resilience agreement. That requires negotiating with clarity about what exists: 75% dependence, shared infrastructure, aligned economic interests, and the technical and political will to build resilience from within.

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Sources:

• https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66404
• https://www.elfinanciero.com.mx/economia/2026/03/03/mexico-gana-en-dependencia-energetica-rompe-record-en-importaciones-de-gas-natural-de-eu-en-2025/
• https://expansion.mx/empresas/2026/03/18/mexico-depende-en-75-de-gas-natural-de-eu-sheinbaum
• https://www.gob.mx/sener/prensa/publica-sener-la-politica-publica-en-materia-de-almacenamiento-de-gas-natural?idiom=es
• https://www.ejecentral.com.mx/nuestro-eje/sener-presenta-estrategia-para-fortalecer-infraestructura-de-gas-natural-hacia-2030-cuanto-se-invertira
• https://mexicobusiness.news/energy/news/usmca-heads-review-energy-under-spotlight
• https://mexicobusiness.news/energy/news/mexico-natural-gas-crossroads-heading-2026