Transition discusses fuel supply and prices in second meeting with Petrobras

The Mines and Energy group of the Lula government’s transition team was at Petrobras this Monday (5) for the second meeting with the company’s management to carry out a diagnosis and propose measures for the new management, not yet chosen by the president-elect .

At the meeting, the focus was on the fuel supply sector and the state-owned company’s pricing policy, which is questioned by members of the transition team, and ensured that the company has enough stocks to supply the market until the end of the year.

In a note, the working group said that the state-owned company was monitoring fuel supply in the face of difficulties in global supply after the start of the Ukrainian War. The company explained the fuel pricing policy and the refinery sales process.

No measure, however, has yet been defined. The members of the transition say they are just gathering information to prepare a diagnosis on the situation of the company and the Brazilian fuel market.

Regarding pricing policy, the transition team’s assessment is that the opening of the refining and fuel sector did not bring the expected results, they wrote, in an article published in SheetJean-Paul Prates, Rodrigo Leão and William Nozaki, three of those who attended this Monday’s meeting.

“Instead of attracting investments and competitive prices, Brazil began to live with the growing volatility of internal prices, the absence of new investments in the national refining park and the increase in dependence on imports to supply the internal market”, they claim.

This Tuesday (6), the group meets again with the state-owned company to discuss the investment plan for the next five years, released last week, with forecast investments of US$ 78 billion (R$ 409 billion) and forecast distribution of up to US$ 80 billion (R$ 420 billion) in dividends.

With a focus on the pre-salt layer, the plan will be altered by the new government, which wants the state-owned company to return to segments abandoned by previous administrations, such as refining and renewable energies, claiming that the global scenario has changed since the current strategy began to be adopted, in 2016.

“The company needs to incorporate not only decarbonization into its climate change strategy, but the production of clean biofuels and power generation, using renewable sources”, defend Prates, Leão and Nozaki.

“Maintaining the strategy of focusing only on the production of dirty energy and remaining dependent on imports of derivatives is what threatens us with a known past of losing our energy sovereignty and contributing to the pollution of the planet”, they conclude.

One of the priorities of the transition in relation to the state-owned company is to suspend negotiations for the sale of assets so that the processes are reassessed by the new management of the company.

Until the beginning of November, when the latest data became available, Petrobras had ten asset sale processes signed but not yet concluded — two of them, the sale of the Manaus refinery, and a stake in the Búzios field, the largest in the country. , were completed last week.

Another 15 processes were in the binding phase, when there are already direct negotiations with interested parties. One of these, the sale of the Betim refinery, ended two weeks ago because the proposal presented was below the expected value.