Brazil raises biodiesel blend mandate to B12

The Brazilian government has announced that the country’s biodiesel blending mandate will be raised from the current 10% level (B10) to 12% (B12) from April, ramping up to 15% (B15) by 2026, AgriCensus reported on 17 March.

The move – announced by the country’s national energy policy committee (CNPE) – was welcomed by the biodiesel sector, AgriCensus wrote.

“This initiative brings juridical predictability for the biodiesel sector to intensify its investments and puts Brazil on the pathway to lead global diesel decarbonisation efforts,” the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries (ABIOVE) was quoted as saying in a note immediately after the announcement on 17 March.

Although the increased blending mandate was broadly in line with industry expectations, the announced ramp-up schedule was more cautious than the country’s biodiesel sector had been pushing for, the report said.

ABIOVE – along with Brazil’s biofuels producers’ association (Aprobio), Brazil’s union of biodiesel and biokerosene (Ubrabio) and the national union of household agriculture and solidarity-based economy (Unicafes) – had told AgriCensus at the end of February that the sector believed B15 could be reached by March 2024.

The announcement would increase domestic demand for biodiesel and upstream products, particularly soyabean oil, which accounts for 70% of the feedstocks used to produce biodiesel in Brazil, according to the report.

Brazil’s biodiesel blending mandate had reached a maximum of B13 and was scheduled to reach B15 in March 2023. However, it was reduced to B10 in 2021 in a government bid to control domestic inflation and had remained at that level since, the report said.

According to estimates ABIOVE shared with AgriCensus earlier this year, the move to B12 would increase Brazil’s soyabean oil demand from the biodiesel sector by about 800,000 tonnes/year. Meanwhile, the country’s food agency Conab has pegged Brazil’s 2022/23 soyabean oil output at 40.4M tonnes.

Eni and PBF Energy develop US biorefinery

Eni Sustainable Mobility has formed a 50/50 joint venture with petroleum refiner and supplier PBF Energy to develop a bio-refinery in the USA, which is currently under construction on the site of PBF’s Chalmette refinery in Louisiana.

The St Bernard Renewables (SBR) facility was expected to have a processing capacity of about 1.1M tonnes/year of raw materials, with full pre-treatment capabilities, the companies said on 16 February. It would produce mainly hydrotreated vegetable oil (HVO) (renewable diesel), with a production capacity of 1.15bn litres/year (306M gallons/year).

Eni Sustainable Mobility said it would invest up to US$835M – and a further US$50M subject to project milestones – in the joint venture and provide expertise in bio-refining operations, supply and marketing.

PBF said it would contrib- ute its industrial knowledge of the USA to the project and would operate the biorefinery, which was scheduled to start production in the first half of this year.

Italian multinational energy firm Eni is involved in the exploration and production of oil and gas, as well as renewable fuels companies said.

The biorefinery would use the Ecofining process developed by Eni in cooperation with Honeywell UOP, the

Eni Sustainable Mobility, which started operation on 1 January, is part of Italian oil and gas company Eni and is involved in operations relating to bio-refining, marketing and distribution of fuels, including HVO and biomethane.