Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s campaign promise of a refinery for his home state of Tabasco is being delivered this week. The 340,000 b/d Olmeca refinery in Dos Bocas will be inaugurated on Friday, July 1, exactly four years after López Obrador won the presidency.

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“With president López Obrador inaugurating his flagship Olmeca refinery, what we see is a move to keep reminding average Mexicans that self-sufficiency in fuels is a goal of the utmost importance and whose cost is a pill that the country must swallow,” Rice University’s Adrian Duhalt of the Baker Institute for Public Policy told NGI’s Mexico GPI. 

The refinery was delivered with a massive price. López Obrador said cost overruns could be in the range of 20-30% over the budgeted $8...