January 07, 2026 [Oil Price]- Mexico’s crude oil exports are shrinking fast – and this time the decline is not just a symptom of upstream exhaustion. Average crude exports have fallen from about 1.1 million b/d in 2020 to roughly 665,000 b/d in 2025, a near 40% drop. In December 2025, Mexico’s exports reached 503,000 b/d, marking a 21^st century minimum. The drastic decrease is even starker for Maya, Mexico’s flagship heavy grade: December exports slid to 253,000 b/d, down 86% from 2020 levels. Ironically, the rapid decline in Mexico’s crude exports happens at the same time as the Trump administration seeks to gain control over Venezuela’s heavy sour barrels.

Production, by contrast, has eased far more modestly, declining by only around 100,000 b/d over the same period. That widening gap points to a structural shift: Mexico is exporting less crude largely because it needs more oil for its refineries at home. With roughly 60% of exports historically flowing to the US, the pullback has become increasingly visible in trade, signaling first good news from the industry to President Sheinbaum’s administration – the long-promised revival of domestic refining is beginning to show up in numbers.

The pivot traces back to 2019, when former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador launched a project to reset Mexico’s National Refining Systema (Sistema Nacional de Refinación, SNR). After decades of underinvestment and chronic underutilization, the strategy aimed to rehabilitate six aging refineries, restore idle units and integrate the new Dos Bocas (Olmeca) refinery into the domestic fuel system. The objectives were explicit: lift utilization rates materially and reduce Mexico’s structural dependence on imported gasoline and diesel.

By the end of 2025, the reset remained incomplete. Mexico’s six legacy refineries plus Dos Bocas have a combined nameplate capacity of around 1.98 million b/d. Yet actual refinery runs remain well below that ceiling. In November 2025, total throughput across the system stood at only around 1.14 million b/d (a 10-year high), underlining how far the system still operates from its theoretical capacity.

Even so, utilization has improved markedly over the past year. In November 2024, only one refinery saw utilization rates above 50%. By November 2025, five out of seven exceeded that threshold, with the strongest gains seen at the Tula, Cadereyta, Salina Cruz and Dos Bocas plants. Tula climbed to a 79% utilization rate, the highest in the country, while Dos Bocas surged from 17% to 61% in a single year. Cadereyta rose from 35% to 61%, and Salina Cruz improved from 44% to 60%, signalling that operational recovery is spreading beyond a single flagship site.

The recovery is evident in the output of refined products. Between November 2024 and November 2025, diesel production in the country jumped from 162,000 b/d to 280,700 b/d, a 42% year-on-year increase, while gasoline output rose from 307,000 b/d to 412,600 b/d, up 26%. Trade flows confirm the downstream shift. According to Kpler, average US diesel exports to Mexico fell from 187,000 b/d in 2023 to 118,000 b/d in 2025, a 37% reduction, while gasoline imports declined from 338,000 b/d to 309,000 b/d over the same period. These figures include supplies from PEMEX’s Deer Park refinery in Texas, which averaged about 30,000 b/d to Mexico in 2025, meaning the decline in third-party imports is even more pronounced.

Two main challenges continue to define the limits of the refining recovery. The first is financial. Years of neglect left refineries old, brittle and inefficient, and while the government has tried to curb fiscal exposure, there is still no visible path to sustaining the system without public support. According to Mexico’s Energy Sector Program 2025–2030, federal subsidies used to contain gasoline and diesel prices between 2018 and 2024 totaled MXN 833.4 billion (about US$46.3 billion) – a sum exceeding the cost of building Dos Bocas itself, and one that blurs the line between social policy and industrial investment.

The second constraint is energy security. Refining is an energy-intensive industrial process, and Mexico’s inland refineries have long been exposed to disruptions in electricity supply. The Tula, Salamanca, Cadereyta and Minatitlán refineries were designed decades ago around assumptions of stable power and hydrogen supply that no longer hold. Grid congestion, transmission outages and maintenance failures have repeatedly forced unplanned slowdowns or shutdowns at these sites. In practice, refinery runs have at times been curtailed not because of crude shortages or mechanical failures, but because of insufficient or unreliable electricity to operate compressors, pumps, hydrotreating units and safety systems.

Looking ahead, Mexico’s two most prominent refining assets will be the new Dos Bocas refinery, which is already delivering the largest gains in domestic production, and the Tula refinery, where long-delayed modernization could unlock the system’s next step-change. By November 2025, Dos Bocas was running at 61% utilization, processing 206,800 b/d, signalling that both of its 170,000 b/d distillation units have been operating already. Gasoline output, which weakened over the summer following repeated power outages, rebounded sharply in autumn, reaching 89,200 b/d in November.

At Tula (Mexico’s second-largest refinery and now its most heavily utilized one), a long-delayed coking unit, designed to convert low-value fuel oil from heavy Maya crude into gasoline, diesel, LPG and petroleum coke, is expected to lift fuel output by as much as 70% once fully operational. Yet the coker remains unfinished, nearly a decade behind schedule. While PEMEX previously targeted end-2025 for commissioning, current estimates push the coker’s launch toward late Q1 2026, with a naphtha hydrodesulfurization unit critical for low-sulfur gasoline also slated for completion in 2026 – large expectations for the clean products output in the months to come.

Mexico’s crude exports are falling, but not because oil has completely run out. They are falling because refineries are finally waking up. The recovery is real – visible in utilization rates, product output and shrinking imports – but it remains operationally fragile, fiscally heavy and dependent on infrastructure with little margin for error. Whether the shift proves durable will depend less on headline capacity than on power stability, maintenance discipline and whether long-delayed projects like Tula’s coker finally cross the finish line.