Mexico oil exports to end in 3 yrs under AMLO

Mexico will stop exporting crude within three years, if the frontrunner in the country’s July 2018 presidential races is elected, an official from the National Regeneration Movement (Morena) said on Thursday.

In an interview with Reuters, Rocío Nahle, Morena’s parliamentary co-ordinator and potentially Mexico’s next secretary of energy, said that under Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, the country’s energy strategy would be refocused.

AMLO supports investing in maintenance and upgrade programmes at Mexico’s six existing refineries to boost capacity, so the country can concentrate on producing more value-added fuels, instead of exporting its crude to be refined elsewhere.

“In a period of three years at the latest, [we would] try to consume our fuels and not depend on outside fuels,” Nahle told Reuters.

In addition, the presidential candidate is considering constructing new downstream infrastructure to achieve energy independence, including one or two refineries in oil-producing states. “We are doing the technical and economic analysis to see if it will be a large refinery or two medium refineries,” Nahle said.

Pemex exported an average of 1.17 million barrels of crude each day in 2017, while simultaneously importing 808,000 bpd of fuels, or about two-thirds of total domestic demand.