By Stefanie Eschenbacher and Shariq Khan
(Reuters) – Mexico’s Pemex this month shipped its first fuel export cargo from its new Olmeca refinery to India, a sign of progress after multiple delays and spiraling costs, according to shipping data and industry sources.
Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, whose term ends on Sept. 30, staked part of his legacy on the 340,000 barrel-per-day refinery in Dos Bocas by promising that it would wean Mexico off costly motor fuel imports.
Pemex loaded around 112,000 barrels of petroleum coke from Olmeca on the vessel Ocean Royal at the port of Dos Bocas on Sept. 11, according to data from ship-tracking service Kpler.
It then picked up a larger cargo of the same industrial fuel from Corpus Christi in Texas on Sept. 15, the data showed.
Petroleum coke is used in power plants or in the manufacturing of various items such as glass or steel.
Olmeca’s cargo is heading for the port of Dahej, an industrial hub in India’s west-coast state of Gujarat, home to chemical and petrochemical companies. The cargo should reach its destination by the end of October, according to Kpler.
Neither the first exports from the new refinery nor the destination and volume of the deal have previously been reported.
Pemex has done another deal to sell petroleum coke from Olmeca, one of the sources said, and is also producing fuel oil and asphalt there but no gasoline.
Pemex did not respond to a request for comment.
The exports offer an important milestone in efforts to start-up Olmeca, but fall short of government promises that the refinery would be working at full capacity by now.
A photograph of the refinery control unit, shared with Reuters in late August, showed some plants at the refinery were working individually but facing issues with their interconnection.
As of late September, the refinery is still trialing individual units and is in the process of ramping up its coker, a unit that processes residual oil into petroleum coke or feedstocks for motor fuels, two of the sources said.
Some of the units have not reached optimal configuration and some are not yet working in sync with each other, they said.
The outgoing president inaugurated Olmeca in July 2022 in his home state Tabasco, billing it as crucial to energy self-sufficiency for Mexico.
Delays to the venture, whose costs have more than doubled to $16.8 billion, leave it to his successor Claudia Sheinbaum to turn that dream into reality.
Olmeca began diesel production from crude oil in July, according to Pemex. But the output is yet to meet specifications for domestic or international sales, two sources close to the refinery said.
Previously, Pemex had further processed ultra-low sulfur diesel from diesel that was already produced at another refinery.
Pemex said in late August that the refinery had further processed 65,046 bpd of crude oil in July, producing 21,511 bpd of diesel and 8,775 bpd of petroleum coke.
(Reporting by Stefanie Eschenbacher in Sao Paulo and Shariq Khan in New York; Additional reporting by Nicole Jao in New York; Editing by Simon Webb and Nick Zieminski)
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