Pemex begins restart of Mexico’s largest refinery

HOUSTON (ICIS)–Pemex has begun the restart process for the processing units of its Antonio Dovali Jaime refinery in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca state, the Mexican state  energy producer said.

The refinery, the largest in Mexico, has a processing capacity of 330,000 bbl/day, according to Pemex.

An electrical outage caused the downstream units of the refinery to run below capacity, Pemex said.

The outage took place on 9 August, Pemex said.

The company had shut down the refinery after earthquakes struck the region at the beginning of September. In October, Pemex had expected to restart the refinery by the end of 2018.

Earlier in 2018, operations at Salina Cruz were halted in June after Tropical Storm Calvin caused extensive flooding and a fire at the facility.

Mexico’s refineries are important to its petrochemical industry because they are the main source of aromatics and propylene. All of Mexico’s crackers use ethane as a feedstock, which produces mostly ethylene.

Natural disasters and other outages have caused Mexico’s fleet of refineries to run well below capacity.

(adds start of outage, paragraph 4)