A gas-export terminal threatening the “world’s aquarium” tests Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum’s pledge to protect the environment.

Por Caroline Tracey (Border Chronicle)

HAVANA TIMES – On the unseasonably warm afternoon of January 29, 2025, hundreds of people flying inflatable whales, wearing whale-shaped hats, and holding cardboard cutouts of the marine mammals marched into Mexico City’s Zócalo, or central plaza, to stand before the neoclassical, fortresslike National Palace. They suspended a banner that read, “¿Ballenas o Gas?” (Whales or Gas?). Musicians with saxophones, trombones, and marching drums accompanied the fanfare. Clotheslines strung with children’s drawings of marine life hung beneath the banner.

Activists had created the “Ballena Fest” (Whale Fest) to celebrate the delivery of more than 215,000 signatures denouncing two connected projects affecting the country’s northern borderlands: the Sierra Madre Pipeline and the Saguaro Energía Liquid Natural Gas Terminal. Part of Plan Sonora, the 500-mile pipeline would begin in Texas’s Permian Basin, cross the border states of Chihuahua and Sonora, and end on the shores of the Gulf of California, in the largest gas terminal in Mexico’s history. From there, thousand-foot barges, up to three each day, would carry 30 million tons of gas a year to markets in Asia.

The plan caused alarm in the U.S. and across Mexico—especially for its impacts to the Gulf of California, famously deemed the “world’s aquarium” by oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. For the past six months, the ¿Ballenas o Gas? campaign has sought to stop the projects through public awareness, legal action, and pressure on banks and the Mexican government.

In the early years of the 21st century, the U.S. oil and gas industry developed a technology they had long dreamed of: hydraulic fracturing. Better known as fracking, the extraction method consists of shooting pressurized fluid into tightly compressed shale, releasing natural gas that can later be refined into oil. By 2011, so much gas was being produced that President Barack Obama began approving the construction of export terminals. The first liquid natural gas exports from the contiguous United States left Louisiana in February 2016.

On the heels of the U.S. boom, then president of Mexico Enrique Peña Nieto began crafting policies to promote the importation of this gas, both for use in Mexico and for reexport. While terminals in Louisiana and Texas were convenient for exporting to Europe, reaching Asia—the world’s largest gas market—from the Gulf of Mexico’s ports required passing through the clogged Panama Canal. (California, meanwhile, has state environmental laws that prevent terminals from being constructed on its stretch of the Pacific Coast.)

Mexico Pacific, the company behind Saguaro Energía, had its eyes on those Asian markets. Founded in 2017 and owned until December 2024 by Houston private equity firm Quantum Energy, the company zeroed in on Sonora’s Gulf of California coastline as a sweet spot between geographic proximity and regulatory feasibility.

The Gulf of California is home to one-third of the world’s marine mammal species, more than 60 species of invertebrates, and about 90 species each of fish, stingrays, sea stars, sea turtles. “You find everything in the gulf,” said Alberto Búrquez of the National Autonomous University of Mexico’s Institute of Ecology. “That’s why Cousteau called it the world’s aquarium.”

Yet the gulf’s marine life—especially creatures like whales, at the top of its food chain—has been under threat for years, because of overfishing, nearby mining, and warming water temperatures. In 2019, UNESCO changed the gulf’s World Heritage Site designation to World Heritage in Danger. “It should be closed to any more development, at least until we find more sustainable ways of using it,” said Búrquez.

Mexico Pacific says it has unique environmental and social commitments aimed at protecting the areas affected by its pipeline and terminals. “We’ve adopted a development philosophy [of] delivering large-scale energy infrastructure the right way,” said the company’s vice president for government and external affairs in a 2024 interview. (Mexico Pacific did not reply to The Border Chronicle’s interview request.)

Activists say otherwise. In a letter sent to Mexico Pacific in December 2024, the Natural Resources Defense Council wrote, “There may never be a clearer prescription for destruction of a natural World Heritage Site than the plan that Mexico Pacific is pursuing for the industrialization of the Gulf of California.”

According to Nancy Carmina García Fregoso of Baja California’s Center for Renewable Energy and Environmental Quality, the gas-export barges pose two principal risks to marine life: collisions and noise pollution. There has already been a fatal collision between a cruise ship and a whale in the gulf, she said, and barges would be nine times the size of cruise ships.

The noise would affect the creatures, meanwhile, because they use sound to locate their food. “Any fisherman will tell you that they fish in silence,” said Claudia Campero of the organization Conexiones Climáticas (Climate Connections).

On land, the proposed terminal would dwarf the small town of Puerto Libertad, which is located on the gulf’s northeastern coast—about halfway between Puerto Peñasco (Rocky Point) and Hermosillo—and counts fewer than 3,000 residents. Activists point out that its footprint would be 70 times that of Estadio Azteca, the 87,000-seat Mexico City stadium that is home to the country’s national soccer team.

According to Búrquez, Puerto Libertad is home to cardón cactuses that are the “tallest and largest columnar cacti in the world,” a bighorn sheep population, and a community of boojum trees that recent research found to have greater genetic diversity than any other grove. Building the terminal, he said, would come “at the cost of denuding the land where these majestic cactus forests grow.”

Despite such concerning impacts, Mexico’s government includes Saguaro Energía as part of its Plan Sonora, a renewable-energy strategy. The oil and gas industry frames gas as a “bridge” fuel, arguing that because its combustion emits less carbon dioxide than that of coal or oil, it can be used to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while renewable-energy infrastructure is being developed.

Campero calls this a “trap and a falsehood.” The gas itself is methane, which, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, traps 28 times as much heat in the atmosphere as carbon. Though its combustion emits less than other sources, the gas’s extraction, transportation, and storage all release methane. Conexiones Climáticas calculates that Saguaro Energía’s emissions will equal those of Portugal and Sweden combined.

Conexiones Climáticas and 30 partner organizations launched the ¿Ballenas o Gas? campaign against Saguaro Energy on September 10, 2024. They saw whales as a powerful symbol that allowed the public to connect to the project’s more technical aspects.

“In Mexico we’re very proud of having multiple species of whales, both resident and migratory,” said García Fregoso. “It’s an emblematic species, a mythic and mystic animal.”

At first, the campaign circulated via infographics on social media. Then it launched the Escuela Salva Ballenas (Whale-Saving School), which collected thousands of drawings from children around Mexico—including those displayed at Ballena Fest. Its network of comercios aliados (ally businesses) encouraged supportive shopkeepers to collect signatures, post and distribute campaign materials, and host informative events.

Then the activists put pressure on the project’s weak points: funding and permitting. Mexico Pacific does not have a final investment decision (the commitment of a sponsor whose investment will allow the project to proceed), its pipeline is not completely permitted, and its terminal’s permits are now many years old, so activists have pushed for them to be reconsidered.

On social media, participants targeted banks working with Mexico Pacific as financial advisers—including Mitsubishi UFG, JP Morgan, and especially Santander, which has branches in Mexico. Participants shared images that read, “Do you have an account with Santander? Your money may be used to destroy whales’ ecosystems,” and left comments with the hashtag #BallenasoGas on Santander’s Instagram account. When the bank shut off its comment function, they moved to Facebook.

In January, after submitting their 215,000 signatures and holding Ballena Fest, the activists held a meeting with Mexico’s Secretariat of the Environment and Natural Resources (SEMARNAT), where they raised their concerns about the project and the government’s seeming support for it. At a CEO summit held in October 2024, President Claudia Sheinbaum—a climate scientist—had posed for a photograph with Mexico Pacific CEO Sarah Bairstow. Mexico had found itself on shaky ground with foreign investors after its September 2024 judicial reforms, and she was touting Mexico Pacific’s planned $15 billion project as a sign of the country’s positive business climate.

In an interview, SEMARNAT secretary Alicia Bárcena said Sheinbaum had asked the secretariat to “carefully review” each component of the project. “It’s a project that worries us very much,” said Bárcena. “Puerto Libertad [is] an area of navigation for whales, dolphins, and sharks. The impact could be very great.”

Finally, five legal challenges were also brought against Saguaro Energía. On March 3, the Mexican government stated that construction could not proceed until they were resolved. Two days later, the company filed a Change in Control notice with the U.S. Department of Energy, a sign that it had been sold. The new owner is Kronos Polo L.P., a company created in December 2024 and based in Fort Worth, Texas.

“It’s a pause that allows us to breathe, but we can’t rest,” said Campero.

Given the pro-extraction climate in the U.S. and the degree of public attention in Mexico, the Saguaro Energía project may become the first test of Sheinbaum’s highly touted environmental commitments. On the U.S. side of the border, meanwhile, President Donald Trump pushed to loosen energy regulations starting on his first day in office. At the same time, his cat-and-mouse game over tariffs threatens to end the free flow of oil and gas across the border, potentially making the project less attractive to investors. The activists of ¿Ballenas o Gas? are keeping a close eye on both administrations’ actions on gas extraction, climate change, and the unique Gulf of California ecosystem.

“This isn’t the type of development that we are looking for,” said García Fregoso, the Baja California environmentalist. “It’s not sustainable. It doesn’t take the environment into account. And it’s not worth it in the long term.”

This article is the second in a series on Mexico’s ambitious and controversial renewable energy plan called Plan Sonora. The first article can be read here.

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