🚥 Chasing Chinese capital

Leia em português

States compete for tax incentives. They also compete for attention. The decision to invest in a territory begins well before any spreadsheet, the moment someone in Shanghai or Rotterdam knows the place exists and has a working idea of what it does well.

Rio Grande do Sul has plenty to offer: an energy mix largely made of renewables, a diversified industrial base, strong universities, and an agribusiness sector integrated into global supply chains. What's missing is the intermediary — reliable information in English, arriving on a predictable schedule, written for decision-makers.

Radar Invest RS was built to fill that gap. Each month it will deliver reporting on the state's economy for investors, executives, and diplomats around the world, with one ambition: that the name Rio Grande do Sul travel abroad with the same weight it already carries at home.

Rio Grande do Sul is turning livestock and crop residue into gas that can be metered and sold. Sulgás, the piped gas distributor present in 38 municipalities that together account for 47% of the state's GDP, takes up to 30,000 cubic meters a day of biomethane into its network from Bioo's operation at the Triunfo petrochemical complex, 52 kilometers from Porto Alegre.

In Esteio, in the Porto Alegre metro area, the company is assembling the Sulgás BioHub, a single receiving and injection point with equivalent capacity, fed by trucks from producing plants and open to new suppliers through a public call issued in April. In Passo Fundo, a preliminary layout calls for 19 kilometers of pipeline to serve a local network running on renewable gas alone.

Further south, in Capão do Leão, 265 kilometers from the capital, Geo Del Sur — a partnership between Estancia Del Sur, the farming arm of Grupo Reiter, and Geo Biogás & Carbon — will pump BRL 120 million into a plant scheduled for 2027. Initial capacity is 400,000 cubic meters per month, against a licensed ceiling of 800,000 m³. Feedstock will come from the group's own agricultural operations, and the output is earmarked for Reiter Log's gas-powered trucks.

A survey by the 17 Institute, drawn from Seapi's herd declaration database under the ABC+ RS plan and conducted with the Agriculture Ministry and Embrapa, mapped more than 4,800 hog farms across 288 municipalities in the state. Twenty-nine of them operate biodigesters, treating 523,600 cubic meters of waste annually and avoiding 17,600 metric tons of CO₂. 

Another 254 properties have the scale to support individual units, which would keep a further 255,000 tons out of the atmosphere annually. Paraná, Santa Catarina, and Rio Grande do Sul together hold 36% of Brazil's biogas plants in operation, under construction, or being retrofitted, according to CIBiogás.

Wind power is drawing capital on a parallel track. Installed capacity in Rio Grande do Sul totals roughly 10 GW across all sources, with wind accounting for a little over a sixth of that, and Sindienergia-RS has proposed adding 5 GW of renewable generation capacity by 2030. In Dom Pedrito, the Torquato Severo wind complex, developed by DGE Soluções Renováveis and Casa dos Ventos, is designed for 700 MW and more than BRL 3.9 billion in investment, with operations due to begin in 2029.

The 49th Expointer edition runs from August 29 to September 6 at Parque Assis Brasil in Esteio, with 5,756 animals entered for judging, 12% more than last year and the highest count since 2012. Last year's fair moved BRL 4.4 billion in business.

This year's program foregrounds animal genetics, technology, and family farming, and the event will be carbon-neutral, with every Expointer-related emission offset through the purchase of carbon credits — a marker of where the state's agribusiness chain is heading towards sustainability.

Desenvolve Município's second phase generated BRL 1.1 billion in concrete investment opportunities across 55 municipalities, spanning 61 projects: industrial districts, innovation hubs, climate protection works, and cultural facilities. Invest RS trained local managers for over 10 weeks in partnership with Unisinos, and the initiative was recognized by the International Economic Development Council, the sector's largest body.

Invest RS maintains a collection of sector books on investment opportunities. This first edition highlights energy: the document gathers data, projects, and openings across the state's energy sector. Also available is the agency's monthly report, which includes a balance of the projects it advises.

Both rest on RS em Dados, the agency's bilingual open data platform, which offers interactive maps and dashboards on the state's economy, companies, workforce, and international trade.