Mexico City, Feb 22 (IANS) Mexico produced an average of 2.95 million barrels of oil per day last month, a decline of 5.9 percent from January 2007, state-owned Petroleos Mexicanos (Pemex) has said. Pemex attributed the steady drop in output to the gradual exhaustion of the Cantarell field in the Gulf of Mexico, Spanish news agency EFE reported Friday.

While oil production fell, Pemex pumped a record 6.53 billion cubic feet per day of natural gas in January, a gain of 13.9 percent over the same month last year.

Mexico, the second largest foreign supplier of oil to the US, exported 1.43 million barrels per day (bpd) of crude in January at a median price of $79.60 a barrel, generating revenues of $3.54 billion. The firm said the volume of exports was 9.4 percent less than in January 2007 due to bad weather that forced Gulf ports and oil facilities to suspend operations for several days.

President Felipe Calderon’s administration has been consulting lawmakers on a potential bill that would allow Pemex to turn to foreign oil companies for capital and technology for extracting petroleum from deepwater deposits in the Gulf of Mexico.

Though the rightist head of state insists he is not aiming at privatisation of Pemex, many Mexicans are wary of opening the state-owned giant to private investment.