The state-owned Pemex will continue to export oil next year, contrary to what President Andrés Manuel López Obrador has said, who has repeatedly promised that the country would abandon shipments abroad to focus on local fuel production.
The Federation Expenditure Budget Project (PPEF) published this afternoon states that the country will reduce its exports next year to average a shipment of 784,000 barrels per day, a decrease of 17% compared to the current shipments of the state.
The company has broken this plan on several occasions. At the end of 2021 –before the sharp increase in prices– it planned to export 435,000 barrels per day during this year, to abandon the activity in 2023. But the rise in prices, caused by the war in Eastern Europe, and the poor performance of the refineries, led the state company to back down from its plans and continue with its exports, although at a lower rate than in previous years. Pemex has exported an average of 963,000 barrels per day this year.
Pemex mainly increased its exports of light crude, a mixture that has a higher value in the market.
For 2022, the Ministry of Finance projects a lower price for the Mexican mixture and has placed the barrel at 68.7 dollars per barrel, a figure below what has been seen in recent months and which has helped the oil company increase its income and reduce their dependence on federal support. For the remainder of the year, it places this value at 93.6 dollars per barrel. “It is expected that for the remainder of the year no major price increases will materialize due to expectations of a global economic slowdown, effects on Chinese demand and the start of winter in the northern hemisphere, which may generate some substitution with natural gas. ”, says the document.
The project also ends another of the presidential goals and reduces the production goal by 2024. The document states that by the last year of the president, the state-owned Pemex and the private companies will produce 1,909 million barrels.
After constantly reducing the projections, the last presidential forecast was for the state oil company to add 2 million barrels of production by 2024. The goals have been constantly reduced, the president set as an initial goal that at the end of his six-year term the company would reach a production of almost 2.7 million barrels.
The Ministry of Finance says in the document that these latest projections assume “a conservative path with respect to the projections of Pemex and private companies.”
The government has requested a budget of 678,000 million pesos for the oil company. The figure is only 1.6% higher than the expense that was assigned for this year.
