The Dos Bocas refinery is a 340,000 barrels per day (BPD) oil refinery, the biggest of its kind in Mexico, under construction on a 566ha piece of land near Dos Bocas maritime terminal, in the Paraíso municipality of Tabasco, the southeast region of the North American country.
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The engineering and construction work for the refinery is divided into six packages the first of which at estimated to cost US$ 1.7bn involves the construction of distillation and coking plant facilities, while the second package whose cost is US$ 1.79bn includes the construction of a diesel hydro desulphurization (DHDT) unit, a Gasoil hydro desulphurization (HDS) unit, a naphtha hydro-treating (NHT) unit and a naphtha reformer.
The third involves the construction of fluid catalytic cracking (FCC) unit at an estimated cost of US$ 1.41bn while the fourth package involves the sulphur recovery plant, the gas recovery and treatment plant, and the hydrogen-producing plant for US$ 351.4M. The fifth and sixth packages involve respectively the construction of storage facilities and refinery integration services.
In total, the Dos Bocas Refinery will have 17 processing units including a combined distillation plant, a delayed coking unit, a fluid catalytic cracker unit, a naphtha hydro-treating unit, a naphtha reforming unit, a sulphur recovery plant, a gas recovery, and treatment facility, as well as a hydrogen-producing plant.
The delayed coking unit will convert the residue from the combined distillation plant into higher-value products, while the fluid catalytic cracker unit will use catalysts to break large distillation fractions into lighter products.
The hydro-treating unit will remove sulphur, nitrogen, and some aromatic compounds from the distillation fractions.
Dos Bocas Refinery project team
ICA Fluor, a joint venture between the Mexican engineering and construction company, ICA, and the US-based engineering and construction company Fluor, received a contract to undertake the work on package-1 of the Dos Bocas Refinery project.
Samsung Engineering in partnership with Mexico-based Asociados Constructores DBMR was awarded the contract for Packages 2 and 3, while KBR and Mexico-based Constructora Hostotipaquillo jointly bagged the contracts for packages 4 and 6.
Mexicana de Recipientes a Presión is working with KBR and Constructora Hostotipaquillo, on package-6 of the Dos Bocas refinery project.
Van Oord in consortium with Grupo Huerta Madre received a contract for land reclamation works for the Dos Bocas refinery, the scope of which included the creation of 600ha of new land, 400ha of dynamic compaction, and 6 million m3 of dry earth movement.
China’s state-owned Bank of China and the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) are partly financing the construction of the Dos Bocas refinery whose cost is approximately US$ 8bn.
Project timeline
2019
In June the site preparation work for the refinery project began.
In July the contracts for five work packages including packages 1-4 and package-8 were rewarded and the following month i.e., August 2019, Mexico’s environmental regulator ASEA granted a construction permit for the project.
2020
By the end of 2020, the project was reportedly between 20 and 25% complete, with a 2022 start date.
In the same year, it was announced that the Dos Bocas refinery project could cost up to US$ 12.4bn, up from the latest US$ 8.9bn budget, which was already adjusted from the original US$ 8bn cost.
