Mexico Sees a Future in Shale Gas. Just Don’t Call it Fracking.

In the swampy lowlands of Mexico’s Gulf Coast, Petroleos Mexicanos is pumping high-pressure jets of water, chemicals and sand into the ground to crack open natural gas-soaked rocks that are so hard they don’t yield to traditional drilling.

In most of the world, the technique is calling fracking. But in Mexico, where the practice is still deeply controversial, Pemex has a different name for it: “stimulation of complex geological deposits.”