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A Tale of Two Borders In May 2010 Mexican President Felipe Calderón paid an official state visit to Barack Obama at the White House. Calderón’s visit occurred during the immediate fallout of an unpopular Arizona immigration bill, SB1070, a law intensifying the criminalization of undocumented migration in the U.S.-Mexican border region. In their opening public addresses, both Calderón (a critic of the legislation) and Obama (a proponent of a differently focused national, comprehensive, immigrationreform policy) emphasized the spirit of cooperation necessary to lead their nations and the region toward a prosperous future. While the media helped stir public discourse into its usual frenzy by focusing on immigration and border security, the topic at hand behind closed doors took a different turn. The two leaders were faced with a different, longstanding , high-stakes border issue—the U.S.-Mexican maritime border in the Gulf of Mexico. Since the 1970s, geologists, oil-company executives , and politicians have become increasingly preoccupied with the underwater hydrocarbon resources in the Gulf. Particularly in the maritime border region, these oil resources are thought to be deep, valuable, exceedingly abundant, and thus—if not handled with both the proper technology and the most careful diplomacy—the stuff of a potential political border battle. Calderón’s visit coincided with one of the biggest environmental crises of the Obama presidency, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Just as the Ixtoc I blowout in Gulf waters in 1979–1980 was far from an exclusively Mexican event, the Macondo well blowouts and the BP rig disaster were not a tragedy entirely bound within the confines of impermeable CHAPTER 6 Energy Security on the U.S.-Mexican Maritime Border: Transboundary Oil in the Deepwater Gulf 234 Post-Peak Politics national U.S. borders. Felipe Calderón, like many in the Mexican public as a whole, was no doubt watching the Deepwater Horizon event unfold with great interest and deep concern. The Gulf was Mexico’s backyard , too. But given the very different ways the neighboring countries structure the relationship of the ocean’s hidden yet valuable resources to national sovereignty and patrimony, the two leaders had potentially quite different needs and expectations of how to manage Gulf hydrocarbons and especially how to manage these resources under crisis conditions —whether that crisis be political, economic, or environmental. Since coming to office, Calderón had found himself in a permanent storm of a Gulf oil emergency. At the center of the storm, citizens looked to the state to protect, not cede, the resources found in their patrimonial seas. For the Calderón administration, Cantarell’s peak status, the political struggle over energy reform, and the economic conditions in Mexico deeply affected by recession and an uncertain oil future gave very little legitimacy to a national Mexican energy policy. For Pemex, the shallow waters of the Gulf of Mexico are the problematic past, and the deep waters hold the solution for the future. Though failing to pass his fully envisioned energy reform based on a private-sector-driven acceleration of deepwater drilling, Calderón nevertheless was succeeding in a piecemeal expansion of private service contracts for multinationals operating in deep waters of the Gulf. Pemex has continued to dedicate more and more of its exploration budget in deepwater projects, up to $20 billion in the Gulf in 2011. Meanwhile, no deepwater wells significantly contribute to the dwindling national production. On the U.S. side of the maritime border, the Gulf of Mexico represented endless possibility for U.S. energy policy still tied to fossil fuels with pretensions toward energy independence. In early 2010, just weeks before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Obama was all systems go on new plans for offshore drilling by the private sector. Even though part of the western Gulf’s outer continental shelf was already open to leasing and drilling and companies were busy off the coasts of Gulf states, Obama had just rescinded the decades-old moratorium on offshore drilling along areas previously closed to drilling. Along with much of the eastern coastline (Delaware to Florida) and northern Alaska, a drilling moratorium on the eastern Gulf of Mexico was lifted. Though actual production would be many years in the future, billions of dollars in cost, and highly uncertain in its yield, one thing was certain on both sides of the Gulf: who stood to benefit from the uptick in Gulf drilling. Despite all of the uncertainties and strong protests from...

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