Vehicles queue at a gas station in Oaxaca, Mexico, on June 5, 2015, PATRICIA CASTELLANOS/AFP/Getty Images
Mexico’s gasoline-crunch continued on Wednesday, the result of everything having gone wrong at once. Illegal pipeline taps have been rising (from 1,620 in 2012 to 4,218 in 2014, and already 2,813 this year), and each takes 24-48 hours to repair afterwards, during which no gasoline can be transported. Secondly, the Cadereyta refinery (one of the largest in the country) recently began maintenance, joining two other refineries that have already been producing at low levels due to ongoing maintenance. Lastly, a billing website of the international trading arm of Pemex (Mexico’s monopolistic state oil company) went down for several days, so gas station managers could not send their requests for resupply. On average, gas stations are losing about $600 per day due to the shortages.
As a result, Mexico has had to import an unprecedented 75,000 additional barrels per day beyond the normal 400,000 bpd. A Pemex spokesman said on Monday that the extra imports should be cut in half by Wednesday, and things will return back to normal by next week. But on Wednesday, nine Mexican states were still sharply feeling the shortage, and it is uncertain how evenly the recovery will be throughout the country. One industry association predicted that the supply of gasoline would normalize this Thursday in Jalisco, while another expects “red flags” to continue in Aguascalientes, San Luis Potosí, and Zacatecas.
Better IT support for Pemex’s billing websites is crucial, because extra imports that can be quickly distributed to gas stations are supposed to be the country’s safety net, compensating for refinery maintenance and pipeline theft. And one potential long-term solution to reduce illegal gasoline tapping is to monitor pipelines with drones. They are increasingly popular in Mexico, and are already being used for numerous beneficial purposes, such as monitoring endangered animal species and preventing forest fires.
Drones do not always favor the authorities in the game of cat-and-mouse between them and criminal groups (for example, there is evidence that cartels have started using drones to fly drugs over the border into the U.S.). But pipeline theft needs to be done manually, with storage containers and transportation. So in that context, surveillance drones give the Mexican government a major advantage — that is, if police can then be mobilized quickly enough to intercept the thieves.
Some drones are already monitoring pipelines, but this should be scaled up dramatically. Doing so could also provide a needed boost to Mexican manufacturing.
