Mexico's Oil Refining Hits 11-Year High as Olmeca Refinery Finally Ramps Up

For the first time since it was inaugurated with fanfare and no crude, the Olmeca refinery on Mexico's Gulf coast ran both trains of its crude unit at the same time. That single operational milestone, reached in mid-December, pushed Pemex's national refining runs to their highest level in about 11 years and gave President Claudia Sheinbaum's government the win it has been promising on Dos Bocas since she took office.

Pemex's seven domestic refineries processed roughly 1.2 million barrels a day in December, up 6.7% from November and the strongest month of 2025. The number that made it possible sits in Tabasco. Olmeca, the plant almost everyone still calls Dos Bocas, averaged about 263,000 b/d for the month and briefly touched a combined throughput near 320,000 b/d when both crude combination trains fired together at the end of December, each running near 160,000 b/d.

What actually happened at Dos Bocas

The plant is built around two parallel processing trains, each fed heavy Maya crude, with a nameplate capacity of 340,000 b/d. Until this month, only one train had carried the load at any given time, which capped what the refinery could physically do. Running both trains simultaneously is the difference between a plant that exists and a plant that produces at scale.

On December 29 and 30, each train operated at around 160,000 b/d, putting total throughput near 320,000 b/d. For December as a whole, Olmeca averaged 263,402 b/d at a 77% utilization rate, its best output since the plant began processing crude in 2024. That figure cleared Pemex's year-end target of roughly 260,000 b/d, and it made Dos Bocas the single most productive refinery in the Pemex system for the month.

The comparison tells the story. Tula, rated at 270,000 b/d, averaged about 220,650 b/d in December. Salina Cruz, rated at 340,000 b/d like Olmeca, averaged around 210,200 b/d. The newest and most troubled plant in the fleet ended the year at the front.

Why an 11-year high matters

Mexican refining has been shrinking for most of a generation. Aging plants, deferred maintenance, fires, and unplanned outages dragged utilization across the Pemex system into the low-to-mid range for years, forcing the country to import a large share of its gasoline and diesel from U.S. Gulf Coast refiners. A single strong month does not reverse that, but reaching the highest processing level in about 11 years signals that the added capacity from Dos Bocas, plus firmer runs elsewhere, is finally showing up in the aggregate.

The December system total of 1.2 million b/d was up 39.4% from a year earlier. That year-over-year jump is almost entirely the Dos Bocas story: a plant that contributed close to nothing in late 2024 was contributing more than a quarter-million barrels a day of runs by the end of 2025.

The plant that took years to work

None of this came cheap or on schedule. Dos Bocas was a signature project of former President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, pitched as the tool that would end Mexico's dependence on imported fuel. It was formally inaugurated in mid-2022, then sat for roughly two years before it processed meaningful volumes of crude. Cost estimates climbed well past the original budget toward the neighborhood of 20 billion dollars. Critics spent years calling it a white elephant, and the nickname stuck.

The 2025 ramp was not linear. The refinery hit an early peak near 175,000 b/d in June, then slumped through July and August before recovering hard in September, when runs jumped about 87% month over month to just under 195,000 b/d. From there the operation clawed its way up through the fall to the December figures.

Pemex has been candid, at least in technical terms, about why the climb was bumpy. The company has cited adjustments to the cogeneration system, weather from heavy regional rainfall, port and logistics constraints on moving product, and reliability events in key units including the Maya crude unit and a catalytic unit. Those are the ordinary growing pains of a complex refinery in its early life. They are also exactly the kind of problems that keep a plant from stringing months together.

What is still not finished

Running both crude trains is the headline, but Olmeca is not fully commissioned. Most process units have entered commercial operation, yet the alkylation and butane isomerization units remain in start-up and stabilization. Those units matter because they upgrade lighter streams into higher-value, higher-octane gasoline blendstock. Until they are stable, the refinery is producing crude runs at scale without extracting the full product value from every barrel.

So the right way to read December is as a capacity milestone, not a finished plant. Pemex can now show it is physically able to run near 320,000 b/d on its best days. Turning that into consistent, high-yield output every month is the next job, and it depends on the reliability of exactly the units that have already given the operators trouble.

The cross-border angle

Every barrel Mexico refines at home is, at the margin, a barrel of U.S. fuel it does not need to import. Mexico has long been one of the largest export markets for Gulf Coast gasoline and diesel. As Dos Bocas runs harder and Pemex's overall system firms up, that import pull softens. It will not vanish. Pemex still finished 2025 at about 1.013 million b/d of average system runs, short of its 1.297 million b/d annual target, which means the country continues to lean on imports to cover demand. But the direction has changed, and refiners in Texas and Louisiana are watching Tabasco more closely than they were a year ago.

The bottom line

Dos Bocas spent years as shorthand for a project that cost too much and delivered too little. In December it delivered. Both crude trains ran together, the plant led the Pemex fleet, and national refining reached a level Mexico had not seen in about 11 years. The unfinished secondary units and the gap to Pemex's annual target are the reminders that this is a beginning, not a victory lap. The question for 2026 is not whether Olmeca can hit 320,000 b/d. It already has. The question is whether it can do it in January, then February, then every month after that.