Mexico City — Mexico’s state-owned oil company Pemex faces an against-the-clock task to revamp its six refineries in order to produce enough fuel to meet the country’s demand and ensure lower gasoline and diesel prices, as promised by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador on his first day as president in 2018.
To achieve this, Pemex is building two coker plants at the Tula and Salina Cruz refineries to reduce the production of fuel oil and increase the production of gasoline and diesel, but the works have faced delays since 2022.
In October 2022, Pemex’s CEO Octavio Romero Oropeza told Bloomberg Línea that fuel self-sufficiency would be achieved in 2024, but the company now says that the Salina Cruz coker would be ready until 2025.
Pemex reduced its production of fuel oil and gasoline during May, according to data from the Energy Ministry.
Pemex also reduced gasoline production in May but maintained the level above 303,000 barrels per day, a decline of 8% on the previous month, while, during the first week of June, production fell to 254,000 barrels per day.
One of López Obrador’s flagship projects during his six-year term is Pemex’s seventh refinery, Olmeca, also known as Dos Bocas, in Tabasco, but which is still undergoing tests with the goal of producing fuel at full capacity by December of this year.
Production of fuel oil, a highly polluting and money-losing petroleum product, totaled 274,000 barrels during May, a drop of 41,000 barrels, or 13%, compared to the previous month, when they reached record levels not seen in more than a decade.
The Mexican oil company’s production of fuel oil totaled 337,000 barrels per day in April.