MOSCOW (MRC) -- The Mexican government will invite four companies to bid in a restricted tender to build the new Dos Bocas refinery for state oil company Pemex, reported Hydrocarbonprocessing with reference to Energy Minister Rocio Nahle.
Dos Bocas would be Pemex’s seventh domestic refinery and is intended to help wean Mexico off growing fuel imports, a major campaign promise of President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who took office in December.
Firms, including US-based Bechtel and KBR, Italy’s Eni Saipem, Japan’s Chiyoda Corporation, and Mexico’s ICA Fluor , were mentioned as “proposed companies for the restricted tender” in a Pemex presentation about the refinery from late last year seen by Reuters.
The energy minister added that the names of the companies selected by the government would be made public later on Monday during an event to mark the anniversary of the 1938 nationalization of the country’s oil industry and the birth of Pemex.
Nahle said that the refinery, slated to be built in the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, has already been granted all required government permits, including for construction.
Lopez Obrador, who favors a more state-centric energy model, has been a sharp critic of the previous government’s constitutional reform that ended Pemex’s decades-long monopoly and allowed private and foreign oil companies to operate exploration and production projects on their own.
The 2019 budget for Petroleos Mexicanos, as Pemex is formally known, calls for spending almost USD2.5 billion on the Dos Bocas refinery, which aims to be able to process 340,000 barrels per day of heavy crude.
That processing capacity would make the new refinery Pemex’s biggest.
Government officials estimate the total cost of the refinery at between USD6 billion and USD8 billion.
As MRC wrote before, in June 2018, Petroleos Mexicanos disclosed the results of the bidding process for the rehabilitation and commissioning works to be carried out on the H-Oil Plant located in the Miguel Hidalgo refinery in Tula, in the state of Hidalgo.
Pemex, Mexican Petroleum, is a Mexican state-owned petroleum company. Pemex has a total asset worth of USD415.75 billion, and is the world's second largest non-publicly listed company by total market value, and Latin America's second largest enterprise by annual revenue as of 2009. Company produces such polymers, as polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), polystyrene (PS).
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