Recently, there has been heavy news in the international oil market. Mexican oil company (Pemex) announced that they will completely stop exporting crude oil to the international market in 2023, and 2022 will serve as a transition period, and the export scale will be reduced by 50% to 435,000 barrels per day. This move means that crude oil, the traditional energy market, will lose a heavyweight player.
As a well-known resource country in the world, Mexico exports oil to the United States, India and other countries all year round, with a daily crude oil export volume of more than 1 million barrels. However, because Mexico’s refining technology and equipment are not mature enough, while they export crude oil to the United States, they also have to rely on the United States to supply refined oil. Therefore, Mexico’s plan is mainly to realize its “dream of energy independence.”
According to Mexico, in the past five years, Pemex’s refining equipment has never been 100% operational, or even less than 50%. Compared with the “no one interested” in Mexico’s refining equipment, the production capacity of U.S. refineries usually reaches 90%. Because the American guy next door has a mature oil refining plant, it is very convenient to buy ready-made. It is reported that in 2020, 60% of the gasoline produced by U.S. Gulf of Mexico refineries was sold to Mexico.
Therefore, if you were lazy in the past, you will have to make up for it in the future. Mexico said it has set a goal to achieve a refining capacity of about 1.5 million barrels per day in 2022 and further increase it to 2 million barrels per day in 2023. In order to achieve this goal, in addition to promoting the refurbishment and maintenance of oil refining equipment, Mexico also went to Houston in the United States to purchase some oil refining facilities.
Mexico’s initial idea is that if it can increase its daily refining capacity by about 650,000 barrels, it will reduce U.S. refined oil imports by 50% (based on 2020 data). Of course, if Pemex chooses to stop crude oil exports, how to make money in the future is also a question.
Data show that this Mexican state-owned enterprise is burdened with debts of US$113 billion (equivalent to approximately 719.6 billion yuan), ranking among the top companies in global energy exports. As for Mexico’s plan to halt crude oil exports, in addition to the impact on the United States, Asian countries such as India and South Korea will also tremble. Data shows that Asia accounts for approximately 25% of Mexico’s oil exports.
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