Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex)'s greatest industrial success during this six-year term lies on the other side of the Rio Grande. The Deer Park refinery in Texas has become the cornerstone of the state oil company's refining system, less than two years after it was fully taken over by the López Obrador administration for $600 million. The factory, previously owned by Shell, processed an average of 270,000 barrels of oil per day and 232,000 barrels of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel per day in 2023. However, more than 80% of production does not end up in Mexico, but remains in the USA for marketing.
Given the ongoing delays in the start-up of the Dos Bocas refinery in Tabasco, which is now scheduled to start up on January 31, Pemex's refining results are primarily attributable to this plant. Pemex director Octavio Romero Oropeza praised Deer Park's performance this week during its recent appearance at the National Palace. D “The President's decision to acquire this refinery was very good,” he concluded. In September 2023, the refinery reported a profit of $711 million, down from $954 million in 2022. However, the manager attributed this decline to the global decline in crude oil prices.
The Pemex refineries are located in Cadereyta, Nuevo León; Madero City, Tamaulipas; Minatitlan, Veracruz; Salamanca, Guanajuato; Tula, Hidalgo and Salina Cruz, Oaxaca. Energy analyst Ramsés Pech points out that the production capacity of these refineries is currently below 50%, a percentage significantly lower than that of Deer Park, whose utilization rate, according to Pemex, is around 80%.
The expert says that despite the care, these are very old plants that, due to their inefficiency, lose more the more they produce. Last year, the network of these six refineries owned by Pemex produced a combined 423,000 barrels per day of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, down 6.2% compared to 2022. While Deer Park alone contributed 232,000 barrels per day of these products, accounting for 35% of the total production reported by Pemex last year. Although Pemex is aiming to increase refining capacity at these six refineries, this will not happen until the coking plants, whose equipment was promised for this year, come online.
Far from producing barrels of gasoline and higher-value products, Pemex's six refineries in Mexico have created a strain on resources. According to its latest financial report, Pemex Transformación Industrial, the entity to which the refining division is assigned, recorded a net loss of 88,892 million pesos from January to September 2023, making it the only subsidiary of the parastatal with losses of this amount.
Despite this financial catastrophe that it represents for Pemex, the most indebted oil company in the world with a total debt of more than 105,000 million dollars, the López Obrador government has not relented in its efforts to support the refinery as part of its project. Energy sovereignty and Although the president had initially assured that Mexico would be self-sufficient in the production of gasoline in 2023 and would stop importing it, the director of Pemex has now, in the last year of his term, recognized that this self-sufficiency will be achieved when at all, in 2025.
Fluvio Ruiz, former director of Pemex and an expert on energy issues, warns that this government's project to increase refining capacity has limits and options need to be analyzed, such as the possible import of suitable crude oil for blending and feeding refineries. of the National Refining System with the nutrition for which they were designed, as well as better planning of preventive maintenance at the six refineries in Mexico.
“It seems time to reflect this political will in a new institutional architecture of the sector, an adjustment of the organizational structure and business vision of our oil company with the aim of transforming it into an energy company and revitalizing its petrochemical activities; as well as a change in its tax system that makes these mutations economically sensible,” concludes Ruiz.
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