Pemex prepares to start operations at Olmeca refinery

Mexico City. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) is preparing to begin operations at the Olmeca refinery, located in the municipality of Paraíso, in Tabasco, which, according to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, will initially produce a minimum of 250 thousand barrels of gasoline per day.

According to a post by the state-owned company on the social network X, Octavio Romero Oropeza visited the oil company’s new facilities on Friday to “review preparations for the start of production.”

Pemex executives said at a conference call with investors and analysts in late July that the refinery’s production for the seventh month would be included in the monthly statistics, which will be released at the end of August.

Reinaldo Wences, deputy director of Evaluation and Regulatory Compliance at Pemex Industrial Transformation, said on that occasion that in July the Olmeca refinery was already processing 100 thousand barrels of crude oil per day in intermediate operations.

Photo X @RefineriaDosBoc

The objective of the new facilities is to produce 340 thousand barrels of fuel per day in order to reduce energy dependence, which in turn will help achieve energy sovereignty by stopping the import of crude oil products, such as gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, among others, from the United States.

Pemex estimates show that by the end of the year the state-owned company is expected to refine around 1.16 million barrels of crude oil per day, counting only the six facilities of the National Refining System (SNR) —which is currently being rehabilitated— and the Olmeca refinery.

In recent days, President López Obrador said that the Olmeca refinery would begin operating this Saturday, after it was inaugurated in July 2023, although the civil works were also inaugurated in the summer of 2022. “It will produce around 250,000, 260,000 barrels of gasoline per day,” he said.

Photo X @RefineriaDosBoc

On July 19, Romero Oropeza said at the morning press conference of the head of the Executive that the Olmeca refinery will reach its maximum processing capacity of 340 thousand barrels per day starting in September, the last month of the current federal administration.

The start of operations of the new facilities was planned for July 2022, but this did not happen, while a year later the tests began, which lasted for more than a year.

The start-up has been postponed on several occasions, according to specialists, this is common due to the complexity involved in processing crude oil.

In addition, the project has been criticized for its cost. Although an expenditure of 8.8 billion dollars was contemplated, data provided to La Jornada in February indicated that the work had a cost of almost 16 billion dollars. The figure was confirmed in May, when Pemex sent its 2023 annual report to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).