WASHINGTON – The Mexican government hasn't said much about the BP oil spill. Some analysts tie the reticence to an awareness that the spill holds worrying implications for Mexico's economic future.

"The spill compromises Mexico's strategy" for restoring its sagging oil production, said Lourdes Melgar, an energy consultant who worked in Mexico's Secretariat of Energy. "The cost will be higher and the regulations more stringent."

Melgar and other energy watchers met here last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies to hear a speech by Mexico's new petroleum watchdog.

In the speech, Juan Carlos Zepeda Molina, president of the Mexican National Commission of Hydrocarbons, said his agency would probably toughen safety requirements for deep-water drilling.

Pemex, Mexico's national oil company, has only limited experience with deep-water drilling. It has yet to bring a deep-water field into production. If Mexico could mount a big deep water exploration effort, the Energy Secretariat estimates it could increase its oil reserves fivefold.

The technology challenge is high. "Deep water is like traveling to Mars," Melgar said. And the big oil companies with the skills to do this sort of work still have technology gaps in preventing, capping and containing oil spills.

Zepeda endorsed two safety changes that would raise the bar. One would require drilling rigs to use better blowout preventers – the giant mechanical valves that sit on top of underwater wells.

Zepeda said he wants to see drillers use blowout preventers with two shear rams (rather than one) that could cut through steel drill pipes and seal a runaway well.

He said he also wants "two-key authority" in drilling operations. This safety approach requires two senior managers to jointly decide on critical steps in drilling a well.

"We need to enforce a double-key procedure so you have the concurrence of more than one judgment on whether a well is correctly cemented, or for some other procedures like starting the well flow," he said.

These are not game-changing requirements. They reflect an urge to get ahead of where U.S. regulators and the industry were before the April 20 explosion that sank the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

In Mexico's case, however, they would come into force when regulators and Pemex are still learning to accommodate each other. Zepeda's National Commission for Hydrocarbons started operating last year, after the congress – with great difficulty – passed an overhaul of Mexico's oil law in 2008.

The law put new controls on Pemex. In addition to the hydrocarbons commission, outside energy professionals were appointed to the Pemex board.

The company's exploration efforts have suffered for many years from inadequate budgets. Now it will get more money, but it will also get more scrutiny.

The company's plan for a short-term rebuilding of production – a wide spread of complex fields north of Mexico City called Chicontepec – is headed back to the drawing board after Pemex's outside directors reacted to disappointing results.

Jeremy Martin, director of the energy program at the Institute of the Americas in San Diego, said the 2008 reforms fell short of what was needed. Pemex can hire non-Mexican service companies, but no other company can take an equity position in the country's oil reserves.

Since 2004, oil production has fallen more than a third.

"The next decade may be worse," Martin said. "Mexico may not be an [oil] exporter within the decade."

That would cut deeply into the Mexican government's budget, and it would compel the United States to find other oil imports to make up more than a million barrels a day.

Mexico and the U.S. have agreed to extend a moratorium on drilling along the boundary across the Gulf of Mexico until 2014. The extension, originally a way for Mexico to come up to speed in deep-water technology, now will let both Mexico and the U.S. come up to speed with deep-water safety.