Page 12 - LatAmOil Week 34 2021

LatAmOil BRAZIL LatAmOil

It also said it had signed a transition contract planned sale of Refinaria do Nordeste (RNEST)
that would allow it to continue supporting Atem in Pernambuco State. It said it had taken this step
with operations at the plant for an undisclosed because all of the companies that had initially
period following the closing of the transaction. expressed interest in the plant had declined to
REMAN is located in Manaus, the capital of submit binding offers. RNEST, located in Abreu
Amazonas. The refinery has atmospheric distil- e Lima, has a throughput capacity of 130,000
lation, catalytic cracking and vacuum distilla- bpd. ™
tion units, and it also owns a marine terminal.
Gasoline and diesel account for about 60% of its
total production.
Atem is a leading distributor of refined
petroleum products in northern Brazil and is
active in the Amazon river basin. The company
accounted for 22% of the region’s wholesale
diesel market in the first seven months of 2021,
handling 652.4mn litres of fuel purchased from
refineries and trading firms. It also claimed 14%
of the regional gasoline market during the same
period, when it handled 153.8mn litres of fuel.
In related news, Petrobras announced sep-
arately this week that it had terminated the The REMAN plant has a capacity of 46,000 bpd (Photo: Petrobras)

ARGENTINA
Brazil, Argentina begin negotiations

on Vaca Muerta gas export pipeline

BRAZIL and neighbouring Argentina have Argentinian officials have said, though, that the
begun negotiations on a multi-billion-dollar pipeline’s capacity could be doubled to 30 mcm
pipeline project that would facilitate exports of per day in a second phase.
gas from fields in the Vaca Muerta shale forma- The project has limited access to funding,
tion, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro said last and Bolsonaro did not indicate how it might be
week. financed. Industry observers have said, though,
Bolsonaro said the pipeline would give the that Brazil might provide financing for the pipe-
Brazilian government a way to reduce natural line, which will carry a price tag of $3.7bn for the
gas prices, an issue for which it is seeking solu- Argentinian section and another $1.2bn for the
tions, according to a Reuters report. “We are in Brazilian section, Reuters noted.
negotiations with Argentina [on] gas from Vaca Vaca Muerta is around the size of Belgium
Muerta,” he said during his weekly live broadcast and contains around 308 trillion cubic feet
address. “It will happen one day because it is not (8.722 trillion cubic metres) of shale gas, accord-
easy to start importing gas. You need pipelines.” ing to the US Energy Information Administra-
The pipeline project has been under discus- tion (EIA). ™
sion since last year. Last October Argentina’s
Energy Minister Darío Martínez and Brazilian
Mining and Energy Minister Bento Albuquer-
que agreed to set up a working group between
the two countries to push plans forward.
The parties hope to establish an export route
for unconventional gas from Argentina’s vast
Vaca Muerta shale formation to southern Brazil.
They have envisioned the construction of a 600-
km, $1.2bn pipeline running from the Brazilian
city of Uruguaiana, in the far southern part of
the country on the border with Argentina, to
Porto Alegre on Brazil’s Atlantic coast.
The proposed pipeline would take a year and
a half to build and have a throughput capacity of
15mn cubic metres per day of gas. Brazilian and The proposed pipeline would be about 600 km long (Image: EPE)

P12 www. NEWSBASE .com Week 34 26•August•2021