An old oil-fired engine plant in north-east Brazil is to get a second life on gas. On 26 October Wärtsilä announced that it will convert the Termocabo power station in Cabo de Santo Agostinho, Pernambuco, from heavy fuel oil to natural gas. The order was booked in the third quarter, and the plant is due back in service in July 2028.
Rebuilding Engines Instead Of Replacing Them
The job is a full engineering, procurement and construction contract. Three existing engines of the Wärtsilä 46 type are changed over to the gas version, the 50SG, and the electrical, automation and auxiliary systems are brought up to date at the same time. The plant is expected to supply about 50 MW to the grid. The customer is Termocabo S.A., whose majority shareholder describes the change as more flexible generation with clearly lower CO2 emissions; the company gives no percentage.
The conversion is tied to a 10-year power purchase agreement that the plant won in Brazil's 2026 capacity auction. Wärtsilä counts it as its fourth gas conversion in Brazil. Another recent engine-plant order from the same company is described in our Moomba report.
Why Old Plants Are Worth Keeping
Brazil expects to need around 14 GW of new capacity by 2031, according to the national energy planner cited by Wärtsilä, because wind and solar are growing faster than the flexible plants behind them. A site with a building, a grid connection, cooling and a trained crew already in place can be cheaper and quicker to bring back than a new one, provided the engines and the auxiliary plant are in good shape.
That last condition is where such projects are won or lost. When a plant changes fuel, the rest of the installation is looked at again: the cooling circuits, the exhaust, the room ventilation, the switchgear. Anyone owning an ageing engine plant and thinking about the same step should ask for that survey early, before the contract price is fixed. The gas-engine side of our power plants page shows what belongs to such a plant.
