The United States Census Bureau removed from its records the 598,000 barrels of crude it had reported as exports to Mexico in May and June 2026, a figure that El Financiero put to Petróleos Mexicanos, whose response was that it has not imported crude this year and has no record of a valid permit.
The correction became known on October 9, 2026: the May crude figure was moved to the auto parts category and the destination of the June cargo was changed to Singapore, according to Bloomberg Línea. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) feeds its export statistics from that database, which before the adjustment recorded 980 barrels in May and 597,027 in June. In October 2019 the Census Bureau had already corrected 541,000 barrels attributed to Mexico. The episode matters because foreign trade figures underpin the traceability of the binational energy supply, and because Mexico exports crude to the United States while concentrating its imports in refined products such as gasoline and diesel.
El Financiero documented that the June cargo was declared through the New Orleans, Louisiana customs district, with crude of 25 degrees API or higher and a value of 69.67 million dollars, equivalent to 19,901 barrels per day. Pemex responded that "to date there is no record of a valid permit to carry out this type of operation," and the Ministry of Energy did not answer the request for information. Fluvio Ruiz Alarcón, a specialist in the energy sector, explained that importing crude is a common practice in the international oil industry, because it allows refineries to be fed with blends close to the parameters for which they were designed.
In October 2018 Pemex's trading arm allocated cargoes of 1.4 million barrels of light Bakken crude, a precedent for imports. With the database now corrected, the next data points to watch are the update of the EIA series and the Ministry of Energy's response on the criteria for crude import permits.
This article was written with the assistance of artificial intelligence from verified sources and reviewed by a human editor before publication.