New Finds Catapult Brazil Oil Producing Status
With Exxon Mobil’s new oil discovery off the coast of Brazil the South American nation has taken another giant step in its quest to become a global energy superpower.
Exxon’s Azulao-1 well tapped a reservoir that reportedly contains as much as 8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, says Luiz Lemos, a partner at TozziniFreire Advogados, a Brazilian law firm that represents foreign energy companies. It was Petrobras that first triggered the rush on Brazil’s energy sector when, in November 2007, the company announced the Tupi discovery - an underwater field that could contain as much as 80 billion barrels of oil equivalent.
This new Azulao find will rival the nearby Tupi oil field as the largest discovery on this side of the planet since Mexico’s Canarell field was discovered in 1976.
Last year, Haroldo Lima, the head of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency, said Carioca could hold 33 billion barrels of oil and gas. Upon hearing the news, brokers and analysts rushed to tell their clients that Brazil, as one minister put it just months ago, was about to become the “new Saudi Arabia.”