Dos Bocas refinery construction cost skyrocketed 56.2%: sources

The construction of Dos Bocas refinery It will cost 12.5 billion dollars and not the 8.9 billion that the federal government projected in October 2020, according to sources with knowledge of the project consulted by the agency. Bloomberg.

The investment amount originally proposed for the work was 8,000 million dollars, so the cost of the work would already accumulate an increase of 56.2 percent. A first price adjustment to 8.9 billion dollars was announced by the management of Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) in October 2020.

“It is now projected that the construction of the Dos Bocas refinery – of 340,000 barrels per day – costs around 12.5 billion dollars according to people with knowledge of the situation who asked not to be identified because the information is not public”, reads a note published this Friday by the news agency.

The rise would be explained by factors such as the rising costs of building materials and delays in the execution of the components of the work.

When presenting Pemex’s refining plan in the last days of December 2021, the Secretary of Energy, Dew Nahle, stated that the refinery will start operations in July of this year and according to the business projections presented, in 2023 it will be working at full capacity, processing 340,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

The start-up of the refinery, as well as the acquisition of the Deer Park refinery in Texas, and the rehabilitation of the six Pemex refineries, make up the cornerstone of an ambitious plan so that by 2023 the state company will stop export crude oil and processes all its oil itself.

In December, the government promised to more than double this year the volume of crude processed by Pemex to one million 509,000 barrels per day, of which 309,000 will be worked in Deer Park, unit whose control was assumed by Pemex this week.

In 2023, the promise is to reach two million barrels per day processed, already with the contribution of Dos Bocas.