Palm | Kelapa Sawit

Brazilian bio-diesel output fell 12% month-on-month to 79.65 million litres (21 million US gallons) in February 2009, Latin America News Digest reports.

The production was 6 million litres below the country's bio-diesel demand. The supply director of oil and gas giant Petroleo Brasileiro said the company will be able to raise the bio-diesel blend with fossil fuel to 4% from 3% now, Latin America News Digest reports.

The increase would result in a 5% reduction in oil imports, he said. Last week, Petrobras launched its third bio-diesel plant, in Montes Claros, Minas Gerais state. The unit is operated by Petrobras Biocombustivel, a subsidiary set up in July 2008 to manage the company's bio-fuel production projects. The new plant has the same production capacity as the other two company units in Bahia's Candeias and Ceara's Quixada, of 57 million liters of bio-diesel per year.

Together, the three plants generate jobs and income for thousands of family farmers and are capable of producing 170 million liters of bio-diesel per year. Petrobras and Embrapa have signed three partnership agreements with a total value of $8 million that cover the consolidation and development of technologies that will be used by Petrobras Biofuel in the production of biodiesel and ethanol, Valor Economico reports. One of these will cover the sustainable management of cane straw.

AE Brazil reports that the International Energy Agency forecasts that global production of bio-fuels will slow sharply this year after several years of rapid growth, but it says that the result would be worse were it not for growth in Brazil. IEA said reasons for slowing bio-fuel growth include lower prices of oil, the restriction of credit, increasingly divergent government support and falling forecasts for transport fuel demand. (14 April 2009)