"Pemex has taken steps to bolster its procedures to safeguard (deepwater exploration) operations," a Pemex source told AFP.

Pemex generates 40 percent of the Mexican government's income. Its main Cantarell well is Latin America's biggest but is in decline.

Currently Pemex pumps 80 percent of its crude from the Gulf, where recent studies show it still has enormous reserves.

And before the end of this year alone Pemex plans to drill four new wells at more than 500-feet depth (152 meters), exploration chief Carlos Morales has said.

That as the United States worked on distancing itself from deepwater exploration in the Gulf, as it reels from the massive economic and environmental fallout from the Gulf spill.

US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday he would issue a new order in the coming days to enforce a freeze on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of the BP oil disaster.

Favio Barbosa, a researcher at the Economics Institute at Mexico City's UNAM university, said "it would be great if this country and other nations make the kind of needed transition to renewable energy sources like wind and solar.

"Unfortunately the global market just is not there yet," Barbosa said.

In Colombia, meanwhile, the national Oil and Gas Agency has received more than a billion dollars in offers to explore Colombian blocs in the Gulf basin over the next 15 years, a government source said.

Those were results of bidding for blocs at auction in the Colombian Caribbean port and resort city of Cartagena, agency chief Armando Zamora told RCN radio.

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