PEMEX Director Presents “Self-Sufficiency” Plan

PEMEX Director General Octavio Romero presented a ten point plan to guarantee PEMEX’s “self-sufficiency” by 2023 during his last press conference of 2021.

The first point concerned reserved replacement ratios. Specifically, Romero wants PEMEX’s exploration and reserve incorporation activities to continue at a constant pace so that the NOC’s reserve replacement rate between 2019 and 2024 can reach 100 percent. The second point concerned this aforementioned increased production: Romero continues to set 2MMb/d as the production benchmark to be reached by 2024. The third point has been hinted at before by President López Obrador but was now explicitly described by Romero: by 2024, all crude production will be processed nationally and meant for the domestic market. No more crude will be exported by the end of this government. Aligned to this objective, the fourth point calls for the continuation of the ongoing investment plan to rehabilitate all facilities in the National Refining System, along with new recovery and development plans for PEMEX’s petrochemical complexes, such as Cangrejera. 

Romero also addressed the need to invest in the remodeling and rehabilitation of the NOC’s fertilizer plants, an arguably controversial matter given the legal issues that PEMEX has been involved with due to the previous purchase of the Agronitrogenados plant. The NOC also called for an increase in natural gas production, although Romero did not specify if this increase was to take place as part of a comprehensive national natural gas development plan, as many in the public and private sectors of the industry have demanded, or merely an increase in the production of associated gas which is part of PEMEX’s current strategy focused on crude production levels. Romero talked about the “recovery of the fuel markets” as well, which is a reference to PEMEX’s efforts to centralize its commercialization of all refined and fuel products to once again be the driving force in this segment.

The last item on the agenda was a program to plug and decommission wells considered “critical risks” in an effort to improve the safety metrics of PEMEX’s infrastructure, along with the labor regularization of PEMEX workers and the further institutionalization of additional support to help the NOC deal with its debt burden.