Samantha Pearson - Financial Times, 07/31/2011
Petrobras, Brazil’s state-run oil company, plans to almost triple its share of the country’s ethanol production by 2015, staking its claim to one of the world’s leading alternative energy markets.
Foreign oil companies such as Shell and BP have piled into the industry this year, vying for an ever greater share of Brazil’s vast sugar cane fields as they prepare to exploit rising global demand for the biofuel from Europe and the US.
However, competition in the industry is set to get even tougher as Petrobras beefs up investment, spending $1.9bn by 2015 to increase its participation of the domestic market to 12 per cent from 5 per cent currently.
