Editor’s Note: NGI’s Mexico Gas Price Index, a leader tracking Mexico natural gas market reform, is offering the following column by Eduardo Prud’homme as part of a regular series on understanding this process.
Inspired by the Spanish example of gas infrastructure management, Cenagas came into being in 2017 to achieve effective open access on Mexico’s national Sistrangas pipeline system together with centralized coordination of flows. It was a hybrid way of achieving openness in an economic sector with monopolistic traditions.
To a large extent, Cenagas has achieved this purpose. The evolution of capacity management contracts on the Sistrangas reflects the existence of a market as a means of assigning natural gas transportation capacity and the presence of a management entity that strives to optimize the use of the system. In 2018, Sistrangas operated with 68 firm-based transportation contracts and 34 interruptible-based contracts, with an aggregate maximum daily quantity (MDQ) of 6,072,353.938 GJ/day. During the following years, the number of firm-based contracts and the reserved MDQ gradually increased, reaching its highest point in 2022 with 73 firm-based contracts, 30 interruptible-based contracts, and a reserved MDQ of 6,819,610.629 GJ/day.