Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) could end up paying around 1,600 million dollars to acquire the entire refinery Deer Park, in Texas, to Royal Dutch Shell, which will increase 2.6 times the cost originally announced for this acquisition of 50% of the plant to which the state oil company would have to pay off its debt.
And the fact is that the state oil company requested around 1.6 billion to acquire this refinery, which it has in a 50% joint venture with the Anglo-Dutch. This loan includes a capitalization of National Infrastructure Fund of Mexico and a bridging loan from commercial banks, according to Pemex documents seen by Bloomberg.
The funds will be used to pay more than $ 1 billion of the refinery’s debt, a part of the agreement that was unclear when the intention to acquire this plant was announced by Pemex. On this capitalization, Pemex and Shell did not comment.
In May, Pemex CEO Octavio Romero Oropeza said the purchase price of the refinery with a processing capacity of 340,000 barrels of crude per day was $ 596 million. However, that amount only included Shell’s share of the joint venture’s debt to the commercial arm of Pemex, PMI, in which both partners had a 50% interest, and not the total debt of the refinery.
The request for funds to buy the refinery was approved by Pemex’s board of directors on November 3, according to a board meeting document, in which the amounts were drawn up.
In addition to paying the debt to complete the transaction, Pemex It will also have to pay Shell for assets such as inventory, the documents show.
The agreement comes after the Ministry of Finance announced a capital injection of $ 3.5 billion from the government aimed at reducing the debt burden of $ 113 billion that Pemex has, the world’s most indebted oil company.
According to President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the acquisition of the new Deer Park refinery will allow Pemex achieve self-sufficiency in domestic production of the gasoline that is consumed, but this, according to the Ministry of Energy, will be with the entry into operations of the new Dos Bocas refinery, which until after the first quarter of 2023 will begin to process around from 270,000 barrels per day of crude to an operation of 85% of its capacity (340,000 barrels per day), a use that is also intended for the rest of the national refineries, for which there is still more than 754,000 barrels per day of process in the system.
The purchase of 49.005% of the refinery in Deer Park It also has the objective of increasing the sale of Pemex fuels, although it should be remembered that by locating in Houston, the national distribution will incur customs and logistics costs typical of imports, even if it is from the same company, in addition to being regulated by US competition authorities in a market where it could be more profitable to sell the products that are refined than to bring them to Mexico for commercialization.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx