“We have Chinese-level increases in gasoline sales that have decoupled from economic growth. It’s been a big effort to keep the market supplied,” Sindicom’s president Alisio Vaz told journalists.
The effect of the imbalance is delivery delays in some parts of the country and fuel shortages in some of the developing states.
Brazil, once one of the region’s fastest-growing economies, is expected to grow just 1% in 2012. Growth has stalled in part from lack of roads, trains and ports. Infrastructure has not kept up with increasing automobile purchases
Vaz said growth models in the fuels sector long used to forecast demand have begun to break down.
Total fuel sales – including jet fuel, cooking gas and ethanol – in the world’s sixth largest economy, are rising 6.3% a year. The Sindicom numbers are preliminary estimates of 2012 consumption and will only be finalised next year.
With the tighter supplies and higher cost of ethanol from the lacklustre sugar cane crop this year, motorists of flex-fuel cars have migrated in mass to gasoline, exacerbating already tight supplies of the fuel.
The state-run oil company Petrobras is absorbing billions of dollars in losses annually from importing gasoline to make up for its refining shortfall on the domestic market. The government holds gasoline prices artificially low for consumers and Petrobras has to cover the spread between domestic and foreign prices.
“We have bottlenecks in infrastructure that challenge gasoline and diesel delivery to the ports of the Northeast,” Vaz said. “Refineries are also at their limit in terms of production.”
