Shortly after, Rocío Nahle, Secretary of Energy and leader of one of the most emblematic government works of the six-year term, assured that the facility would start production in July 2023 after interconnecting the plants and testing.
“Yesterday they began to load, it takes a process of about a month of stabilization,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said at a press conference on Friday, adding that a video will be released later “to explain the entire process.”
“Yesterday the crude oil pipeline valve was opened to begin charging the refinery, an exceptional work,” he added without giving estimated fuel production dates.
The president, a nationalist on energy matters, has promised to stop importing fuels because they will be manufactured internally before the end of his term in October 2024, but experts and sources at the state giant Pemex still doubt this.
In an interview with the local newspaper Contralínea, published last week, engineers leading the Olmeca team said that the refinery would start up on July 1 and that the first barrels of gasoline would come out in September.
Neither the energy ministry nor Pemex responded to a request for comment on when Dos Bocas would go into production, but a senior company source told Reuters he doubted any sustained production would come this year.
“It is impossible for energy sovereignty to be achieved before (the term of) López Obrador ends. It will be a pending and very difficult task for the new government that succeeds him in October 2024,” he said on condition of anonymity.
On several occasions the authorities have given dates for the completion of the construction, commissioning and production of Olmeca that have not been met.
The cost of the work, which was initially assured that it would be 8,000 million dollars, has more than doubled. Reuters revealed in May that an internal Pemex report warned that it was unfeasible for Dos Bocas to start production in July.
In addition, figures from the state giant Pemex, which has six local refineries and one in Texas, show that the company is failing to meet processing and production goals to crown “energy sovereignty” and is struggling to reduce fuel oil production.
Pemex’s six local refineries together processed 758,704 barrels per day (bpd) in May, its lowest level since June 2022 and its lowest since 2023, representing 47% use of total capacity of 1.6 million bpd .