China’s oil giant Sinopec, Abu Dhabi’s Mubadala Investment Company and two Brazilian firms including a joint venture of Shell, have been picked to submit binding bids for four refineries that Brazil’s state-oil firm Petrobras is selling, Reuters reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the sale process.
In late April, Petrobras approved the sale of eight refineries as part of its divestment plan.
The eight refineries have a combined capacity of 1.1 million bpd,
and all eight sales could generate as much as US$18 billion, according to
bankers involved in the privatization.
Petrobras launched the binding phase of
the sale of four refineries out of
eight that it has earmarked for divestment.
The four refineries in the this first binding phase are RNEST in
Pernambuco state with a processing capacity of 130,000 bpd; RLAM in the state
of Bahia with capacity of 333,000 bpd; REPAR in the Paraná state with capacity
of 208,000 bpd; and REFAP in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, also with
208,000-bpd capacity.
Brazilian companies Ultrapar and Raízen—Shell’s joint venture—are
likely to bid for REFAP, REPAR, and RNEST, while Sinopec and Mubadala could bid
for RLAM, Reuters’ sources said.
Brazil’s competition regulator CADE has made Petrobras change its
divestment process so that one company could not buy the two largest refineries
in a single region of the country.
In August, reports emerged that the
world’s top commodity traders along with several oil majors are among the
bidders for the eight refineries that
the Brazilian government wants to privatize.
Glencore, Trafigura, and Vitol are
all among the bidders, and so are Chinese CNPC and Sinopec, as well as Saudi
Aramco, which has been working on building its downstream footprint
internationally, Reuters reported.
According to Reuters’ sources, Aramco has dropped out of the
bidding, while Glencore and Vitol are in talks to form consortia with the four
companies approved to go through the binding phase of the sale of the four
refineries.