Hundreds of thousands of lost jobs. Mass poverty. Factories, farms and whole industries left idle and suffering.
These are some of the most common worries in Mexico if it faced an all-out trade war with President Trump.
But there is another, lesser-known fear of an economic standoff with the United States: Blackouts, big cities suddenly paralyzed and an irate populace ordered to ration electricity.
One of Mexico’s biggest Achilles’ heels in dealing with the Trump administration is energy — its overwhelming dependence on natural gas from the United States.
“An interruption of the flow of gas to Mexico would be beyond chaotic,” said W. Schreiner Parker, managing director for Latin America at Rystad Energy, an energy intelligence company.
“It’s truly one of the unspoken reasons why Sheinbaum has been so accommodating to Trump,” he added, referring to Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
For Mexico, a halt to these fuel shipments, even for a short period, could wreak even greater economic havoc than tariffs, energy strategists warn. That’s because natural gas has eclipsed oil as the country’s largest single fuel source, and is used to produce 60 percent of Mexico’s electricity.
The fears in Mexico revolve around the possibility that Mr. Trump could weaponize natural gas exports to increase pressure on Ms. Sheinbaum’s government, much in the way that Russia moved in 2022 to cut off gas supplies to Europe.
There are no signs yet that Mr. Trump has sought to use the gas exports as an additional form of leverage. But while Mexican authorities generally refrain from drawing attention to the issue, some officials have framed the fuel imports as a glaring vulnerability.
Juan Roberto Lozano, a director at Mexico’s National Energy Control Center, acknowledged this dependence in an interview with the trade publication Natural Gas Intelligence in February, calling it the “elephant in the room” of Mexico’s energy policy.
“The Trump administration is totally aware of this overreliance,” he said, adding, “It’s completely plausible that energy may become a point of contention between Mexico and the U.S.”
Mr. Lozano and other senior energy officials in Mexico’s government did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Trump’s moves to assert more control over cross-border flows of natural resources are feeding the anxiety. The United States said in March it would deny — for the first time — Mexico’s non-treaty request for Colorado River water to be delivered to Tijuana, a city dealing with water shortages.
Mr. Trump followed up by accusing Mexico of “stealing” water from Texas farmers, and threatening to impose additional tariffs and sanctions over the dispute.
Ms. Sheinbaum is already trying to reduce Mexico’s reliance on U.S. natural gas. She said this month that Mexico would aim to raise domestic production by 2030 to 5 million cubic feet a day from 3.834 million cubic feet, as a way to blunt the effect of Mr. Trump’s trade protectionism.
Mexico largely uses the fuel to make electricity and power factories in its low-cost industrial base — the heart of its export economy. Despite Ms. Sheinbaum’s goal of achieving energy independence, Mexico imports more than 70 percent of the natural gas it consumes through a network of pipelines stretching from Texas deep into Mexico’s interior.
For years, the country’s reliance on U.S. gas seemed to make sense. The fracking boom in Texas and New Mexico produced huge volumes of natural gas, and Mexico was able to cheaply import the fuel. Her predecessor bet hugely on fossil fuels, especially on natural gas imports, while ridiculing clean energy projects.
But Mr. Trump’s return to power is now causing many in Mexico to rethink this arrangement, especially as he makes claims on the territory of other countries in the Americas like Canada and Panama.
“This is an issue of national security,” said Raul Puente, head of the underground hydrocarbon storage unit at Cydsa, a Mexican company that has been urging authorities to boost emergency storage of natural gas in salt caverns in case supplies are cut off.
As tensions simmer over the Trump administration’s consideration of unilateral military strikes on cartels inside Mexico, Alfredo Campos Villeda, the editor of the Mexico City newspaper Milenio, weighed what could happen if Mexico stood up in defense of its sovereignty.
“How long could Mexico endure if the United States shut off the supply of natural gas, gasoline, and electricity?” Mr. Campos Villeda asked. “Twenty-four hours?”
The winter storm Uri in 2021 offered a preview of how a supply shock in Mexico could play out. Unusually cold weather put stress on Texas’s energy grid, and Gov. Greg Abbott ordered gas producers to temporarily halt shipments out of the state.
For a few days at the height of the crisis, gas flows to Mexico dropped around 90 percent, resulting in power supply disruptions affecting more than five million households across 26 Mexican states.
Mexico is not without options. Some power plants could switch to fuel oil or diesel to make electricity. Still, such efforts would fall short of making up for a sudden dearth of natural gas.
The country also stands in contrast to Europe, which was able to quickly mobilize billions of dollars to pivot away from Russian gas. Europe has seen a boom, particularly in Germany, in building terminals to receive liquefied natural gas, largely from the United States.
The Mexican government would need to find other suppliers willing to sell it natural gas in the face of U.S. pressure, build or adapt multiple terminals capable of receiving it by ship and pipelines to transport the fuel into big cities. Or Mexico would have to develop nearly from scratch its own industry for tapping unconventional gas reserves.
Either way, energy strategists warn that such efforts could years and require colossal amounts in investment resources that the country doesn’t have.
“There are no other options for Mexico,” said Ira Joseph, a global fellow at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “They don’t have pipelines to any other country.”
Despite these fears, Mexico’s reliance on U.S. natural gas is forecast to grow in the months ahead, with the construction of new gas-fired power plants. A new pipeline, stretching hundreds of miles from Texas to the Yucatán Peninsula in Southeast Mexico, is set to begin delivering gas by mid-2025.
“Our politicians talk about energy sovereignty,” said Mr. Puente, the business executive trying to get Mexico to expand storage of the fuel. “But in the case of natural gas, we are a long, long, long way from being self-sufficient.”
Simon Romero is a Times correspondent covering Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean. He is based in Mexico City.
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