Rio de Janeiro – Brazil’s state-run oil company Petrobras reported Thursday (21) that its refinery utilization rate hit 97%.
“This was due to the completion of scheduled maintenance shutdowns at the Henrique Lage Refinery (Revap) in São José dos Campos, São Paulo, and the Duque de Caxias Refinery (Reduc) in Rio de Janeiro. This figure allowed fora higher production, with diesel, gasoline and QAV yields in the second quarter at 67%, in line with the first quarter of the year, benefiting from favorable market conditions,” Petrobras said.
According to Petrobras, the volume of sales of oil products in the second quarter was up 1% quarter-on-quarter, and the fuel output was up 2.6% year-on-year.
Petrobras has been running its refineries at near capacity to reduce imports of gasoline and diesel fuel that are sold at a loss due to the government’s fuel-price controls. Diesel is Brazil’s most-used vehicle fuel, but the S-10 diesel needed to make engines built to new emission standards function properly only accounts for about a quarter of Brazilian diesel demand. The rest of Petrobras output is S-500, fuel with 50 times more sulfur than S-10.
The pre-salt fields accounted for 73% of Petrobras’ output in the second quarter of 2022 at 1.94 million barrels of oil equivalent (boed) from April through June.
Translated by Guilherme Miranda
