Mexico City. Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) shipped its first shipment of fuel from its new Olmeca refinery to India this month, a sign of progress after multiple delays and spiraling costs, according to shipping data and industry sources.
The Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, whose term ends on September 30, bet part of his legacy on the refinery with a capacity to process 340 thousand barrels per day (bpd) in Dos Bocas, by promising that he would free Mexico from the expensive imports of vehicle fuel.
Pemex loaded around 112,000 barrels of Olmeca petroleum coke onto the Ocean Royal ship in the port of Dos Bocas on September 11, according to data from the Kpler ship tracking service.
On September 15, it picked up a larger shipment of the same industrial fuel in Corpus Christi, Texas, according to the data.
Petroleum coke is used in power plants or in the manufacture of various items, such as glass or steel.
Olmeca’s cargo is headed to the port of Dahej, the industrial center of the state of Gujarat, on the western coast of India, where chemical and petrochemical companies operate. The shipment should arrive at its destination at the end of October, according to Kpler.
Neither the first exports from the new refinery nor the destination and volume of the operation have been previously reported.
Pemex has closed another deal to sell petroleum coke from the Olmeca refinery, one of the sources said, and is also producing fuel oil and asphalt there, but not gasoline.
Pemex did not respond to a request for comment.
The exports represent an important milestone in the efforts to get Olmeca up and running, but they fall short of the government’s promises that the refinery would now operate at full capacity.
A photograph of the refinery’s control unit, shared with Reuters in late August, showed that some plants at the refinery were individually, but not interconnected.
As of late September, the refinery was still testing individual units and was in the process of readying its coker, a unit from which diesel and other distillate fuels are pumped, two of the sources said.
However, some of them have not reached an optimal configuration and others still do not work in sync with each other, they added.
Pemex is also fine-tuning the refinery’s coker, a unit that processes residual oil into products such as petroleum coke or raw materials for motor fuels, one of the sources added.
The outgoing president inaugurated the Olmeca refinery in July 2022 in his home state of Tabasco, calling it crucial to Mexico’s energy self-sufficiency.
Delays in the project, whose costs have more than doubled to $16.8 billion, leave the task of turning that dream into reality in the hands of his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Olmeca began producing diesel from crude oil in July, according to Pemex, but production still does not meet specifications for domestic or international sales, two sources close to the refinery said.
Previously, Pemex had processed ultra-low sulfur diesel from diesel already produced at another refinery.
Pemex said in late August that the refinery had processed 65,046 barrels per day (bpd) of crude oil in July, producing 21,511 bpd of diesel and 8,775 bpd of petroleum coke.
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– 2024-10-02 08:45:32
