The growing production of abundant and cheap shale gas in Texas has spawned the construction of hundreds of miles of new transnational pipelines delivering gas to power plants and industrial centers in Mexico.

Houston Pipeline Company and Oasis Pipeline, both subsidiaries of Energy Transfer Partners, (ETP) based in Dallas, have entered into 15 year agreements with state-run utility Comisión Federal de Electricidad to provide "transportation services." Such services will include making use of the existing pipeline infrastructure on the United States side of the border as well as constructing new segments leading into Mexico. At the same time, Comisión Federal de Electricidad announced plans last week to build a 500-mile underwater pipeline in the Gulf of Mexico, running from Brownsville to the Mexican port city of Tuxpan by 2018.

Exports are already rising and averaged 2.3 billion cubic feet a day through the first three months of 2015, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The new projects are expected to increase that flow south to 4.3 billion cubic feet a day by 2020, according to projections by the energy research firm Wood MacKenzie.