|
Brazilian oil company Petrobras should close, up to the end of the month of October, a sales contract for 380 million liters of ethanol a year to Venezuela - the equivalent to approximately 30 million liters a month.
According to the Supply director at Petrobras, Paulo Roberto Costa, the agreement is already at its final negotiation phase and should be valid for two to three years. "This year we have already shipped to Venezuela three times, totaling approximately 60,000 cubic meters (the equivalent to 60 million liters) of alcohol. The perspective is to double this volume up to the end of the year," said Costa. The Petrobras executive made his statement Thursday, September 21, after a talk by the organization's president, José Sergio Gabrielli, to around 500 executives connected to the Petroleum Club, in Houston, Texas. At the occasion, Gabrielli was declared Honorary Citizen of Houston. Costa stated that currently Petrobras' priority is to export ethanol to the Venezuelan and Nigerian markets (to where shipments have already totaled 20 million liters), but he pointed out that the company has already started negotiating the sale of alcohol to the United States, a market that has a potential of six billion liters. "We are still negotiating. It is a gigantic market, but we don't yet have a forecast for a closing date or volume," stated Costa. Apart from that, he added, Petrobras is finalizing understandings to sell large volumes of alcohol to the Japanese market, where the company also has plans to open a refinery for the processing of heavy oil. In the talk given by Gabrielli, the company's Business Plan for the period from between 2007 and 2011 was presented. He discussed the state owned oil company's main activities in Brazil and abroad and gave details of the US$ 87.1 billion in investment for the period - of which US$ 2.7 billion for expansion of exploration, production and refining activities in the United States. Gabrielli stated to Brazilian journalists that Petrobras plans to put on the North American market the renewable fuels that Brazil produces. He explained that for this purpose the company should work on a series or regulatory limitations imposed by the government of the United States as protection to renewable fuels. "If these barriers are changed, our perspectives of placing the product on that market may be expanded. There are various American groups seeking Brazilian partners in the sector, among them Petrobras, and we are investing in infrastructure for exports of alcohol from Brazil," finished off Gabrielli.
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.