The Secretary of Energy (Sener), Rocío Nahle, said that Mexico does have a lot of wealth in lithium and that the State may well exploit it through a mining company, which does not see technically difficult to do.
“Why are we going to deliver it? Why not develop it ourselves? (…) And when they say: how are we going to exploit it? Well, with a mining company, that is, what is the joke? ”He declared during the meeting of the Federal Government’s Legal Studies Commission.
He added that in the UNAM and in other schools in the country there are metallurgical careers and the country has trained people, this in the context of the electricity reform initiative of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, which reserves the exploration and exploitation of lithium to the State.
But he did not put everything in cotton, Nahle pointed out that the financial question will be another question to be analyzed, “however, it is a whole business, so much that everyone wants it.”
In that sense, he clarified that the mining concessions that were given for lithium, only those that are already exploring or exploiting will be respected, which according to information from the Ministry of Economy only one company is doing it.
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Another point of the electricity reform initiative that the head of the Sener considered to be a whole issue is the cancellation of contracts with independent producers; In this regard, he affirmed that the Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is obliged to buy energy from private parties, which it submits to the state company.
He also put his finger on legacy contracts and self-sufficiency contracts; Of the latter, Nahle said that there are 239 permissions that should have the same number of users, but there are 77,000 users because a parallel market was created.
Regarding the cancellation of Clean Energy Certificates (CEL), the official explained that it was a mechanism with which the CFE also paid private companies; For this, it has disbursed 6,000 million pesos, despite continuing to function the 20 years that are in force would be a loss for the State Productive Company of 100,000 million pesos.
For his part, the CFE attorney general, Raúl Jiménez, assured that in the electricity reform there are no violations of the T-MEC and there would be no expropriations.
“I will refer to a specific point from chapter 14 on investment. There it clearly and precisely indicates that regulatory actions whose purpose is to protect legitimate objects of public welfare do not constitute expropriations, ”said Jiménez.
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