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Petrobras: significant drop in the sale of gasoline and diesel due to the oil crisis generated by the pandemic, leaves the state-owned company's storage capacity in the bottleneck. Despite the crisis, oil exports from Petrobras has been sustaining itself at high levels reached a record in April, with the mark of 1 million barrels per day.
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In order to guarantee the supply of cooking gas and also to produce navigation fuel, Petrobras decided to increase production in the refineries, leaving the company's stocks at the limit.
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Gasoline and cooking gas are produced in the same refining units, which means that the increase in the production of one of them also increases the production of the other.
To avoid storage problems, the state-owned company has consulted fuel distributors in search of tanks to temporarily store its gasoline production. According to authorities, there are still no problems storing oil in Brazil.
With the isolation due to the pandemic, sales of kitchen gas grew by 12% in March. The sector's expectation is that April's numbers will come even higher, as they consider the entire month of isolation.
In addition to the demand for cooking gas, Petrobras has benefited from increased demand in the international market for less polluting shipping fuel in response to new restrictions on maritime transport that came into effect in January.
Pre-salt oil produces cleaner fuel for ships and is valued for its low sulfur content.
Petrobras' refineries operated at almost half capacity in the first half of April, but are currently resuming operations to produce more fuel.
To attract distributors that still have tanks available and want to take advantage of this to store cheaper products, Petrobras holds discounted gasoline and diesel auctions.
According to the National Agency of Petroleum, Gas and Biofuels, refineries, terminals and distributors in Brazil have a storage capacity of up to 137 million barrels of fuel, equivalent to 77 days of production of derivatives in 2019.
Our United States, the lack of space to store oil led oil prices to operate in negative territory for the first time in history on April 20th.
Afraid of having nowhere to store oil, investors preferred to pay rather than receive the barrels. The sector has been resorting to ships as an alternative for tanking, which has caused the shares of maritime oil transport companies to skyrocket.
A large part of oil production in Brazil is stored in the platforms' own tanks – due to the difficulties in building pipelines connecting offshore wells to the coast, Petrobras is the global oil company that most uses units known as platform ships.
