MEXICO CITY – The holiday season has been a little less merry for car owners in Mexico as gasoline shortages in many parts of the country have forced grumbling customers to contend with hours-long lines.
In hard-hit parts like Leon, in Guanajuato state, filling up your tank often means driving around from one station to the next just to find one that has fuel.
“It’s chaos,” said Guadalupe Lopez, a customer service worker in Leon who visited eight stations on a recent day before she finally found a pump that wasn’t dry. “One worker told me they had gone a day and a half without supply.”
Rumors are swirling of gas station owners purportedly hoarding fuel ahead of a price deregulation that takes effect Sunday, and will let them sell it for as much as 20 percent more. Stories abound of Mexicans stocking up as much as they can before the hike kicks in.
Officials are largely downplaying the problems, citing factors such as pipeline theft, increased holiday demand and unforeseen shipping delays, and have sought to reassure consumers that they’re working hard to get the fuel flowing. But even with conditions improved somewhat since Christmas, analysts say a neglected fuel infrastructure is finally catching up with the country, and there’s no quick fix in sight.
Jorge Pinon, an energy expert at the University of Texas, Austin, said Mexico is refining less than 1 million barrels of crude per day this year, down from 1.065 million per day last year. More and more the country is importing its gasoline – about half its current consumption – but state oil company Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, lacks adequate distribution and storage capacity.
“We are up against a total collapse of the refining system of Pemex,” Pinon said.
As examples, he pointed to tankers backed up in the Gulf of Mexico because the port of Veracruz is a bottleneck for offloading, and said pipelines that carry gasoline to central parts of the country are in poor shape and vulnerable to illegal taps.
Fuel theft is big business for organized crime groups such as the Zetas drug cartel, which has a strong presence in the oil-producing Gulf coast region, and officials estimate it accounts for $1.4 billion in losses per year.
In mid-December the Mexican Gas Station Owners’ Association warned that refineries were not operating at full capacity and imported gasoline was not being offloaded from ship because of delayed payments.
“The entire system of refining and distribution is rotten,” said Miriam Grunstein, an energy analyst at Rice University.
Pemex has acknowledged supply deficiencies in four central and western states, though Mexican media reported problems in 13 of the country’s 31 states.
That includes San Luis Potosi, where Mexico City resident Ignacio Lanzagorta shot a widely seen video of dozens of vehicles and people with jerry cans on the side of a highway, waiting for their turn at a Pemex station in the town of Salinas de Hidalgo. Lanzagorta told the AP he made the video Monday while driving from the capital to the central state of Zacatecas.
Pemex says tankers have been stranded in the Gulf by bad weather and unable to unload their shipments on time. It also cited the fuel thefts, which force pipelines offline, and said consumer stockpiling and panic-buying only exacerbated the shortages.
The federal consumer protection agency announced on Wednesday that it was investigating whether some stations may be hoarding fuel until January, as is widely rumored.
“The problem is that there has not been enough investment in infrastructure for the storage and transportation of fuels, which has increased the risk of shortages,” the Mexican government said in a statement debunking “myths” about gasoline that was also retweeted by Pemex. “Going forward, the government will be obligated to increase minimum storage capacity to 15 days of total national consumption.”
Pemex executive Carlos Murriet said in recent days that the country currently has six days’ worth in storage.
Grunstein called that “ridiculously low” and a sign of short-term thinking by the company.
