The new Olmeca refinery to be located near Dos Bocas, in the municipality of Paraíso, Tabasco, will cost almost 19% more than the original budget and will take five months longer than President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s most recent commitment, confirmed Rocío Nahle, secretary of Energy. In addition to the fact that it would be in December when it would already produce its first barrels of gasoline.
Interviewed by Tabasco Hoy, near the facilities of this new refining center, Nahle explained that the total cost of the refinery will be 9,500 million dollars and not the 8,000 that were programmed when the management of the construction of this work was awarded to Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) and to the Secretary of Energy, in 2019. In the end it will cost 9.5 billion dollars, more than initially budgeted, but the official warned that at today’s prices “it is a bargain”, since if it had started today to build, the refinery would cost $20 billion, he said in an interview.
“We have said that it will cost 9.5 billion dollars, because the project was expanded. A gas pipeline was built, an aqueduct was built, a cogeneration system is being built, but also right now this refinery is a bargain. Today this refinery costs 20,000 million dollars to build, we have the advantage that we started its construction in 2019,” said the official.
In addition, since the end of last year, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador confirmed the inauguration date of the plant: July 2, 2022.
However, there were no clarifications about its partial or total startup of operations, nor about its process, so Nahle dispelled doubts: as announced, the construction phase will conclude on July 2 and the plant will be inaugurated by the president to make way for the “start-up tests”, which will take several months, since the more than 90,000 pieces of equipment and parts that make it up will have to work “like clockwork, all synchronized.” Meanwhile, he clarified that in December all the equipment will begin to operate: “we started to work and we started to put all the plants, the plants must work very quickly at 100 percent.”