Introduction

"We were below the expectation", as Juan Carlos Zepeda, commissioner of Mexico's National Hydrocarbons Commission ("Comisión Nacional de Hidrocarburos" - CNH), stated once the results of the first bids in Ronda Uno were public. In a first attempt of explaining the results he continued that "(...) oil prices in the short term are not all of the answer" but that there were "other considerations we need to be looking at." These quotations comprise two of the main avenues of explanations for the mixed results of the first bids: the current low oil price as well as unknown and almost ...