Mexico's Olmeca refinery will restart, halt was 'nothing serious'
Mexico's new Olmeca refinery is ready to restart production, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum said on Tuesday, denying that a temporary outage had been caused by sabotage of its catalytic cracking unit.
Located at the port of Dos Bocas, the Olmeca refinery is still far from meeting the gasoline and diesel production goals set by Sheinbaum's predecessor.
"It's not like that," the president replied to a question during a press conference regarding alleged sabotage at state energy company Pemex, but gave no further details.
The catalytic cracking unit is an important gasoline-producing part of the refinery that uses fluidized catalyst to crack heavy hydrocarbon molecules into gasoline molecules.
Sheinbaum said she would ask a Pemex official to report on what happened.
"It's not about the refinery suddenly not working. It's a smaller issue," she said. "It was producing 100,000 barrels a day and is about to start up again. There's nothing serious."
Pemex did not respond to a request for information about the events at the refinery, the date of any incidents, or the current levels of production.
The refinery only processed 6,797 bpd in February and none in January when the company reported problems with higher-than-usual contents of salt and water in the crude oil Pemex pumps. It has a capacity to process 340,000 bpd. Since June 2024, processing has been marginal.
Reuters reported last week that Pemex exported two shipments of ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) processed in Olmeca because the infrastructure needed to distribute the much-needed motor fuel that Mexico imports is not yet ready.
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