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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: energyplay who wrote (7362)	6/23/2006 3:28:29 PM
From: elmatador	Respond to of 218168

"Imagine what the United States could do by putting soya oil in crude oil," Mr Rodrigues says. "We are opening up new horizons for agriculture and for the oil industry." Breakthrough plants idea of new fuel oil blend By Jonathan Wheatley in São Paulo Published: 22/6/2006 \| Last Updated: 22/6/2006 20:05 London Time For the second in a series of industrial tests of a modified form of diesel, it was an extraordinary turn-out. On hand at the President Getúlio Vargas refinery in Araucária, southern Brazil, this week were the president, two state governors, three ministers, three ambassadors and various senators and federal deputies, along with the president and hundreds of other employees of Petrobras, the government-owned oil group, their families and residents. There was a lot of pomp and a lot of changing into and out of boiler suits and lounge suits. One reason was nothing to do with diesel: Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will declare his candidacy in October's elections this weekend and he is grabbing every opportunity to inaugurate whatever he can before he is barred from confusing presidential duties with electioneering from July 1. But the new diesel itself is worth the attention. Petrobras calls it H-Bio and Roberto Rodrigues, the agriculture minister, says it heralds "the construction of a new age – the age of agro energy". H-Bio uses vegetable oil but is not to be confused with biodiesel, the green fuel already in widespread use in Brazil and elsewhere. Rather, H-Bio uses a process in which refined vegetable oil – made from soya, sunflowers and a variety of other sources – is mixed with ordinary mineral diesel oil during the refining process to produce a diesel that in practical terms is indistinguishable from any other, although of higher quality than that normally produced in Brazil. The process was developed by Petrobras over the past 18 months and its details, currently the subject of a patent application, are being kept secret. But it is cheap. Most of the $38m (€30m, £21m) Petrobras plans to invest in the initial phase of production at three refineries this year and next will be spent on storage and supply lines. During tests, vegetable oil is being mixed with mineral diesel at the ratio of 18 per cent. In production the amount will vary initially between about 10 and 15 per cent. The plan in the first phase is to use 256,000 cubic metres of vegetable oil a year, enough to substitute imports of diesel oil worth $145m. That would rise to 425,000 cubic metres in 2008, substituting diesel imports worth $240m. The numbers are not enormous. At first, H-Bio will represent just 1 to 1.5 per cent of diesel oil consumed in Brazil. But its implications may be revolutionary. Like biodiesel and flex fuel technology – which allows motorists to choose at the pump whether to fill up with petrol or fuel alcohol and is present in almost all new cars sold in Brazil – H-Bio puts Brazil at the forefront of the development of green, alternative fuels. While flex fuel gives consumers freedom of choice at the time of purchase, H-Bio goes a stage further in requiring no engine modification at all. "In 15 years we will be living in a different fuel world," says Jean-Paul Prates, an industry analyst in Rio de Janeiro. "A big part of the fossil fuel economy is transport costs. Now there is an alternative and, if it grows, the geopolitics of fuels will change completely. Even Iraq and Saudi Arabia will lose their dominance." The notion that fuel oils could be planted in the fields rather than brought up from under the earth is a compelling one. The immediate impact may not be great. Mr Rodrigues, the agriculture minister, says use of soya for biodiesel and H-Bio, for example, will account for 2 per cent of Brazil's crop to start with, rising from 2008 to about 4 per cent. But while Brazil has no plans to export H-Bio fuel itself, it does plan to make royalties from exporting its technology. The implications could then be far-reaching. "Imagine what the United States could do by putting soya oil in crude oil," Mr Rodrigues says. "We are opening up new horizons for agriculture and for the oil industry."