Tests with renewable diesel will last for six months in order to assess the quality and performance of the fuel
According to the director of Petrobras' refining area, the renewable diesel tests will start in January with customers to assess the quality while new legislation that allows the insertion of the product in the market is not approved. The fuel, co-processed with vegetable oils, is produced at the Presidente Getúlio Vargas Refinery (Repar), in Paraná.
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The tests of the new diesel will last for six months and will be supported by a distributor and a bus fleet, whose names were not revealed to the public. Petrobras has already been successful in tests at Repar during 2020, but intends to make the product effective through this new testing phase. If success is confirmed, it may increase the mixture of non-fossil content in diesel sold in the country.
The director of Refining and Gas at Petrobras, Rodrigo Costa, stated that the initiative aims to accompany the evolution of the automotive sector towards renewable energy, which is already on the way to electrification and energy transition.
“It is a refinery that is accompanying energy transition… (Such investments) combine an obligation that we have, which is to continue operations in the business, and it still values, makes the asset even more attractive (for sale)”, he said. he.
Repar has a production capacity of 114 thousand tons of renewable diesel per year from the co-processing of refined soy oil.
Composition of the new diesel
In order to continue the tests, a distributor will add the new product to the diesel sold at service stations that currently have a mixture of fossil diesel with 10% biodiesel. After this mixing process, Rodrigo Costa explained that the product that will run in the tank will have 5% renewable diesel from Petrobras and 10% ester-based biodiesel.
In the end, 15% of renewable fuel will be available to customers without any interference, since co-processed diesel has molecules of the same structure as fossil diesel, and can be mixed without problems.
Petrobras strategic plan
The production of renewable diesel is part of Petrobras' project to insert fuels produced from new technologies into the Brazilian market. In the 2022-2026 strategic plan, the oil company intends to invest US$ 600 million in new production units, but it still depends on regulatory advances in the country for this to happen.
“We see the consumer and the market demanding a smaller carbon footprint, with an increasingly cleaner product, and refining is also changing along with this evolution, and biorefining is certainly a lever for transformation that we understand as inevitable” Costa declared.
The investment includes adaptations in the refineries of Paulínia (Replan) and Cubatão (RPBC), both located in São Paulo, so that together they have the capacity to produce, in all, 505 thousand tons per year of renewable fuel. To put the objective into practice, Petrobras requires the Government to include renewable diesel in the mandates for blending mineral diesel sold at service stations.
