Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
Satellite imagery suggests oil from a February spill linked to Pemex facilities in the Gulf of Mexico is still spreading three months later.
The Mexican government has acknowledged that the February 2026 spill originated in a leak within facilities operated by the state oil company, Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex).
Under both Mexican and international law, authorities are required to report hydrocarbon spills immediately, triggering public disclosure and emergency response measures.
But officials did not publicly acknowledge the spill for weeks, even as oil spread across a growing stretch of coastline. The delay has raised questions about transparency, accountability and the consequences of contamination in a shared body of water.
“The regulations are very clear. When there is a hydrocarbon spill, it must be reported immediately,” Alberto Alarcón, a lawyer at the Centro Mexicano de Derecho Ambiental (CEMDA), told TPR.
Under Mexican law, hydrocarbon spills must be reported to the nearest port captaincy and to the environmental regulator, the Agency for Safety, Energy and Environment (ASEA). Regulations governing the hydrocarbons sector require operators to activate contingency and response protocols once a spill is detected, with stricter measures depending on the scale of the incident.
“In fact, the law establishes that once a spill exceeds one cubic meter, that notification must already be carried out,” Alarcón added.
Internationally, the 1990 OPRC Convention, to which Mexico is a party through the International Maritime Organization, requires offshore operators to report oil discharges or probable discharges “without delay” and establish coordinated emergency response systems to contain marine pollution.
New analysis suggests the spill is still unfolding.
Three months after the initial leak, the event “is not in a final remediation phase and remains active and evolving,” according to a report prepared by former Pemex workers using Sentinel-1 radar and Sentinel-2 optical satellite imagery.
The findings, first reported by the Mexican outlet Revista Etcétera, indicate hydrocarbons remained on the water’s surface as recently as April.
“The event is evolving from a massive surface spill into a scenario of persistent and dispersed residual contamination,” the report concluded.
Satellite images appear to support that assessment.
Radar imagery from early May shows elongated dark patches near offshore infrastructure in the Cantarell complex, signatures consistent with oil slicks.
Earlier images from mid-February captured a plume extending more than 50 kilometers from the source, with patterns indicating active dispersion along surface currents.
Optical imagery from late April also shows a diffuse slick stretching across the water, along with linear traces consistent with the use of chemical dispersants. The imagery suggests efforts to break up and redistribute the oil in the water column rather than remove it entirely.
While dispersants can reduce the amount of oil reaching coastlines, they do not eliminate contamination and can push hydrocarbons deeper into the marine environment, potentially affecting fish, plankton and coral ecosystems across the Gulf.
The Gulf’s interconnected ecosystem
The spill has revived comparisons to the 1979 Ixtoc I oil spill, one of the largest offshore oil spills in history.
The disaster began in the Bay of Campeche after a Pemex exploratory well blowout and released an estimated 3 million barrels of oil into the Gulf over roughly nine months.
Currents eventually carried contamination to the Texas coast, affecting more than 160 miles of U.S. beaches.
While far smaller than the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster, the latest Pemex spill has renewed concerns about delayed transparency, offshore infrastructure risks and the difficulty of containing contamination in an interconnected marine ecosystem.
For marine biologist Beto Belin, the spill highlights how deeply interconnected the Gulf of Mexico is with ecosystems far beyond Mexico’s coastline.
Sea turtles, he said, migrate vast distances for feeding, mating and nesting.
Loggerhead turtles, or Caretta caretta, can spend much of their lives near the coast of Africa or the Canary Islands before nesting in the Mexican Caribbean, while hawksbill turtles that nest in Veracruz have also been observed mating in Florida.
Belin recalled one turtle that nested in Veracruz after having been tagged by the Gladys Porter Zoo and previously recorded nesting on South Padre Island.
“If one turtle dies in Veracruz after encountering the oil slick, that turtle will no longer return to the ecosystem where it feeds, the Canary Islands, Florida, Texas,” Belin said. “It will no longer return to the places where it creates ecological interactions, where it forms part of a system.”
For communities along Mexico’s Gulf coast, the consequences have been immediate, but the longer-term risks extend beyond national boundaries.
The Gulf of Mexico functions as a single ecological system, with currents, species and fisheries connecting coastal regions from Campeche to Texas.
Even when oil itself does not visibly reach U.S. shores, its effects can travel through food chains, migratory routes and market reactions.
Three Pemex employees have been removed from their posts, and President Claudia Sheinbaum acknowledged during a morning press conference that the spill originated in Pemex facilities.
“One of the biggest risks we are not yet seeing is public health,” Alarcón said, warning that a large portion of Gulf fisheries could be contaminated and eventually consumed by the population.
“We still do not have much information about what the true impact of this entire spill really is.”
