Surging demand for fuel in Mexico nearly doubles tanker truck traffic at Port of Brownsville

[Elderberry]

Houston Chronicle by  Sergio Chapa June 13, 2019

PORT OF BROWNSVILLE — Alberto Moreno-Valdez starts his day before the sun comes up.

The Mexican trucker lives in the sprawling border town of Reynosa where he begins his day as early as 5 a.m. and heads to the Port of Brownsville to pick up a shipment of gasoline, diesel or motor oil.

It’s roughly 70-miles from the Transportes Santa Maria Express truck yard on the eastern end of Reynosa to the port, but the drive can take hours, depending on border crossing times. Even if Moreno-Valdez manages to get to the port by 10 a.m., it’s still a full day of waiting to get his tanker filled before he can head back to Mexico.

“It’s super slow,” Moreno-Valdez said while waiting on a shipment of motor oil. “I’ll be here until 9 p.m. at night.”

With growing fuel demand and sagging domestic production in Mexico, hundreds of other Mexican truckers find themselves in the same situation. The number of tanker trucks crossing the Rio Grande to pick up shipments of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel and motor oil at the Port of Brownsville nearly doubled between December and March — increasing wait times at the busy deep South Texas port.

Steve Tyndal, the port’s senior director of marketing and business development, said the number of tanker trucks picking up fuel shipments each day has jumped from about 500 at the end of last year to as high as 1,000 in March.

Mexico enacted historic reforms in 2013, ending a seven-decade monopoly by state-run oil company Pemex and opening up energy markets there to private investment and competition. But in order to fight rampant fuel theft, Mexico’s President Andres Manuel Lopez-Obrador shut down refined product pipelines in December — increasing the number of tanker trucks needed to haul gasoline, diesel and other products to market.

With suppliers and distributors in Mexico desperate to find sources of fuel, many of them turned to the storage terminals at the Port of Brownsville.

“This business isn’t something that was planned,” Tyndal said. “It’s what I call cargo by opportunity.”

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/Surging-demand-for-fuel-in-Mexico-nearly-doubles-13976974.php

[thackney]

I helped build a propane terminal in Hidalgo years ago.  It was entirely for tanker truck transport to Mexico.  They use a lower propane vapor pressure, more butane in the mix.  Nothing loaded there could be used in the US.

They would come in a large convoy.  Every tank locked by a forman key.  Tanker Drivers could not unlock.  They had too much history of the tanks arriving lighter than they loaded.