Cancun, Mexico – Central American nations joined with Mexico, Colombia and the Dominican Republic here Tuesday to launch an ambitious and expensive regional energy integration plan.
The program includes the construction of a refinery to process 230,000 barrels of Mexican heavy crude each day, a project that will take its first step in January when a firm is contracted with to perform a feasibility study.
The aspects of the regional plan are being subjected to technical, financial and legal studies of their viability, but the participants have already agreed that the refinery will be built with private capital with the possible participation of governments that want to take part.
Besides the refinery, the integration plan sets forth the construction of a gas pipeline, a thermoelectric plant and a gas processing facility.
The firm to be selected to do the feasility study will be contracted with through the Inter-American Development Bank and must be able to produce its reports within four months.
That analysis will determine if the refinery project will be continued. The location of the facility has not yet been decided at this early stage.
An “integration firm” handling the refinery’s operations would buy Mexican petroleum under a long-term contract, would process it at the refinery and then would sell the derived products to distributors.
Mexican President Vicente Fox rejected the idea that the refinery would become a monopoly, saying that it would compete with other firms who supply energy products to the region.
The Declaration of Cancun laying out the broad strokes of the regional integration plan was signed by the presidents of Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama and the Dominican Republic, as well as by high-level representatives of Belize, Colombia and Nicaragua.
The project would require an investment of between $7 billion and $9 billion, planners say.
The accord also stipulates that construction of an electrical interconnection line between Mexico and Guatemala will begin in 2006.
