Editor’s Note: The following article was initially published by Caroline Tracey in The Border Chronicle on Feb 18, 2025.
How the border state became the center of Mexico’s ambitious renewable-energy plan.
The scale of the deposit caught the Mexican government’s attention. In 2022, then-president Andrés Manuel López Obrador and the country’s Congress passed legislation to nationalize lithium. The president declared the 900-square-mile area in Sonora to be a national lithium mining zone, and mining authorities canceled Bacanora’s concessions. (The country’s geological service also walked back the claim that the deposit was the largest in the world.)
During López Obrador’s six-year term (2018–24), one of his primary policy commitments was “energy sovereignty”: the idea that the Mexican government should control, and profit from, the energy development that takes place within its borders. To further this goal, he discouraged private oil and gas development, used public funds to purchase a foreign-owned oil refinery, and spent at least $70 billion propping up the state-owned oil firm, Pemex.
This focus on oil was widely criticized. Worldwide, energy sources are increasingly being diversified as part of the energy transition—the process of shifting from burning fossil fuels like coal and oil to deriving energy from renewable sources, like wind and solar, that don’t release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
With the nationalization of lithium, López Obrador’s party, Morena—which remains in power under President Claudia Sheinbaum—entered the renewable-energy game. Now, Sonora’s lithium is part of a multipronged strategy called the Plan Sonora de Energías Sostenibles, or the Sonora Plan for Sustainable Energies. But while Mexico’s government says its Plan Sonora will help achieve a more climate-friendly future, it’s drawing fierce opposition both nationally and locally because, critics say, the plan could cause environmental damage and, paradoxically, spur more fossil-fuel consumption.
The border state of Sonora is Mexico’s second largest, after Chihuahua. Its vast geography lends itself to renewable-energy development: The Sonoran Desert hosts the large, sunny expanses needed for large-scale solar farms, while the mountains of the Sierra Madre hold minerals like lithium and copper, which are considered “critical” to the energy transition.
At the same time, Mexico’s demand for power is surging, thanks to the dozens of industrial parks being constructed as part of Mexico’s promotion of “nearshoring”—locating factories and assembly plants closer to consumer markets.
After nationalizing lithium, the Mexican government created the company Litio para México (Lithium for Mexico), or LitioMX. The company will oversee all aspects of the lithium supply chain—exploration, extraction, refining, battery production, and sales. Currently, said Cabanillas, the company is focusing on exploration and has been working with researchers to develop extraction and refining methods specific to Sonoran geology. Eventually, batteries produced by LitioMX will be used to manufacture a proposed Mexican electric car called Olinia—indigenous Nahuatl for “to move”—for the country’s domestic market. One of the car’s assembly plants is planned for Sonora—a logical place, added Cabanillas, because an existing Ford plant means the state already has a workforce trained in automotive assembly.
The second backbone of Plan Sonora is solar energy. Mexico’s Federal Energy Commission is finishing the construction of a solar array located at Puerto Peñasco that, once completed, will be the largest in Latin America. Transmission lines from the panels connect both to continental Mexico’s electric grid and to that of Baja California, from where the electricity can be exported to California, which aims to derive all of its electricity consumption from renewables by 2045. Sites for three to five additional large-scale solar plants are currently being scouted, said Cabanillas. In addition the plan calls for the construction of smaller plants to serve rural towns where the cost of electricity is a major burden on residents.
A third pillar of Plan Sonora is the construction of liquid natural gas pipelines from Texas’s Permian Basin, both to serve industrial parks within Mexico and for export to Asia. (Sonora’s ports offer a route by which U.S. companies can bypass the Panama Canal.) There are two of these projects underway: the Saguaro Energy project at Punto Libertad and the AMIGO LNG Terminal in Guaymas.
The final part of Plan Sonora is infrastructure and logistics—speeding up the movement of products for import and export to, from, and across Sonora. This includes building new highways between the state of Chihuahua and Guaymas, so that exporters can more quickly ferry goods to the port; constructing a cargo train line from Guaymas to Nogales; and significantly upgrading the port itself.
This sweeping Plan Sonora has come with significant opposition. Though framed as a sustainable-development scheme, Plan Sonora has spurred environmental concerns locally and across Mexico over the destruction of fragile ecosystems. The Puerto Peñasco solar farm, for example, was built on salt flats sacred to the Tohono O’odham nation, and an investigative journalist showed that the National Institute of Archaeology called for the Guaymas-Nogales train line to be rerouted in order to avoid harming sensitive historical sites, but the directive was ignored. More than 30 environmental organizations from across Mexico, under the moniker Whales or Gas?, have come together to protest the Saguaro Energy project and raise awareness about the impact that exporting natural gas will have on the Gulf of California’s unique ecosystem.
“Three barges would be crossing the gulf every day and affecting its marine life, above all its whales,” said Nancy Carmina García Fregoso of Baja California’s Center for Renewable Energy and Environmental Quality. “The impacts would be incalculable.”
Another criticism of the plan is that while it purports to be directed at sustainability, “it doesn’t change the mold of consumption,” as geographer Iván Martínez Zazueta noted. In fact, building more renewable-energy infrastructure may, paradoxically, increase fossil-fuel consumption, he said. That’s because renewable energies like photovoltaic panels and wind turbines are intermittent: they produce electricity only when the sun is shining, or gusts are blowing. To avoid interruptions to service, they need to have a backup—often in the form of gas-driven combined-cycle plants.
Critics of Plan Sonora also worry that the new solar plants’ increased energy capacity won’t be primarily for use by Mexicans, but for export to the United States. Demand for solar electricity is growing especially fast in California, which will require 100% of the state’s energy to come from renewable sources by 2045. Yet because other environmental regulations prevent wind and solar plants from being constructed in many areas of the state, Baja California already has multiple wind-turbine plants that sell electricity across the border. Martínez Zazueta refers to this as “green neocolonialism”—yet another wave of Mexico allowing the despoiling of its environment for the benefit of its wealthier neighbor.
At the heart of the Plan Sonora debate are significant differences over what constitutes sustainability and sovereignty. Though large solar arrays don’t contribute to climate change in the same way as burning fossil fuels, renewable energy requires much more land area than fossil-fuel extraction. For many of the residents in areas where it is being developed, it does not seem green, since ecosystems are being plowed under for roads and natural gas terminals. Likewise, critics see the sales of electricity to the United States as exploitative neocolonialism, but the Mexican government sees state investment in lucrative energy resources as a way to reinforce its sovereignty.
These debates are playing out on the ground with significant consequences for communities in Mexico but also for the United States, where the new presidential administration has thrown energy politics, trade, and relations with Mexico into a state of flux. Future Border Chronicle dispatches from Mexico’s contested northwest will follow the progress, opposition, and impacts of the Plan Sonora—whose vision shows that the energy transition can be as much an economic development strategy as a project of fighting climate change.
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