Feb 13, 2012:

Brazil's Petrobras will allow its Venezuelan counterpart PDVSA to assume its stake in the Abreu e Lima refinery as late as 2013 when operations are expected to begin, Petrobras' supply director Paulo Roberto Costa said on Monday. Venezuela's state oil company PDVSA said last week it had managed to extend until the end of March a deadline to make its contribution to a long-delayed refinery project in northeast Brazil.  PDVSA had failed earlier in February to secure a $10 billion loan from Brazil's state-development bank BNDES that it was counting on to pay its 40-percent stake in the Abreu e Lima facility. This was the latest of several deadlines that the Venezuelan company had missed in a six-year saga.

FUEL IMPORTS

Chief Executive Jose Sergio Gabrielli said last week that Petrobras' fourth-quarter earnings fell 26 percent in part because of its need to import record amounts of gasoline in December. Gabrielli said it was impossible for the company to foresee demand for the automobile fuel growing at such a high multiple of economic growth. This did not stop Costa from forecasting the company's 2012 imports of the motor fuel to be similar to last year's imports. He also said that gasoline imports by Petrobras in January were up 36 percent from a year ago. The company had to import gasoline in early 2011 as well due to the spike in ethanol prices after the main cane region entered the interharvest period and production of the biofuel declined. This prompted motorists to switch to gasoline because it was a better buy than ethanol in terms of the mileage for the price of each of the fuels. Millions of cars in Brazil have flex-fuel technology that enables them to run on either or both mixed.

By Reuters