Gasoline no longer the primary fuel for light vehicles in Brazil

By Biofuels Digest special correspondent Al Costa

It´s official now: gasoline is no longer the primary fuel for light vehicles in Brazil. Instead, alcohol is now fueling over 50% of the cars in the country, said Tuesday Almir Barbassa, Petrobras´s CFO.

“Truly speaking gasoline has become the alternative fuel. It is today what ethanol was before”, said Barbassa to journalists at Petrobras headquarters in São Paulo state.

According to him, recent developments in production processes in the sugar cane industry has allowed ethanol to show a very attractive price to the consumer. While 1 liter of gasoline is more or less R$2.50, a liter of alcohol is R$1 cheaper, or R$1.50.

In fact, already during the International Ethanol Summit past month in São Paulo, José Sergio Gabrielli, Petrobras President, had released that the company estimated that the gasoline market for light vehicles will fall 17% of the grand total by 2020.

But Barbassa said the company is not very concerned about this market, and is planning to build five new refineries in Brazil over the coming years. “We are aware that alcohol consumption will increase and we’re prepared for that.”

However, he pointed out that the main focus of Petrobras new refineries will be diesel, for which production in Brazil is not sufficient to meet demand. The company asserts that two major plants planned to be built in the north states of Ceará and Maranhão will produce up to 65% of diesel.

Besides the two refineries, Petrobras will build one in Comperj (Rio de Janeiro’ petrochemical complex) for the production of petrochemical byproducts, another in the northern state of Pernambuco to serve the regional market of fuel, and a small one in the northern state of Rio Grande do Norte.

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