Page 6 - LatAmOil Week 14 2022

LatAmOil MEXICO LatAmOil

Mexico revises plan to

eliminate crude exports

IN light of the rally in global crude prices fol- currently trading at slightly less than $100 per
lowing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mexico has barrel.
decided to revise its plan for diverting domestic The president had previously called for
oil production from exports to domestic refin- Pemex to increase domestic oil production
eries, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador while also reducing crude exports. He did so in
said last week. the hope of bolstering Mexico’s energy security
More specifically, the president explained at and reducing its dependence on foreign energy
one of his daily press conferences, the national resources.
oil company (NOC) Pemex will cut exports, but Lopez Obrador made such slogans a hall-
only from the historical baseline of about 1mn mark of his election campaign in 2018, pledg-
barrels per day to 850,000 bpd. The company ing to construct a new refinery so that more
had said previously that it intended to reduce crude could be refined locally. Additionally, he
export volumes to 450,000 bpd by the end of pledged to curb electricity and fuel prices, which
2022 and then bring exports down to zero by he claimed were rising because of the country’s
the end of next year. increasing reliance on foreign firms that were
According to Lopez Obrador, the new plan charging excessive prices. The president has also
will allow Pemex to take advantage of higher asserted that relying on foreign exports limits
prices. The NOC intends to use its extra earn- Mexico’s oil production capacity. ™
ings to cover the cost of rehabilitating its refin-
eries and to offset the rising cost of fuel imports,
which are causing problems for consumers, he
said.
“We launched a new plan because the price
of crude oil is high and we are in the process of
modernising the refineries. So we are taking
advantage now that the price is high to dedicate
more resources and time to the rehabilitation of
the plants,” he remarked.
It is not yet clear whether the additional earn-
ings from oil exports will offset the rising costs of
domestic fuel subsidies. Finance Minister Roge-
lio Ramirez de la O said last week, however, that
the Mexican government has estimated that it
can continue to subsidise fuel without damaging
public finances so long as crude prices do not
exceed $155 per barrel.
West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude oil is President Lopez Obrador (C) says Pemex will export 850,000 bpd (Photo: Pemex)

TotalEnergies, Sempra Infrastructure sign

MoU on plans for Vista Pacífico LNG project

TOTALENERGIES (France) has signed a mem- major may acquire a minority share in the plant,
orandum of understanding (MoU) with Sempra Sempra said in a statement on March 31.
Infrastructure, a subsidiary of US-based Sem- The statement noted that the document was
pra, on the purchase of a share of future produc- one of two non-binding MoUs that TotalEner-
tion from Vista Pacífico LNG, a plant that the gies and Sempra finalised in late March as part of
latter firm aims to build on Mexico’s west coast. a wider effort to expand the scope of their strate-
The memorandum also states that the French gic alliance in North America.

P6 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 14 07•April•2022