Brazil invest in offshore production

Washington Post:

Everything about the shipyard here is colossal -- the 4,000-man workforce, the billions sunk into it in capital costs, the half-finished 10-story-high production platforms.

But then, so is the challenge facing Brazil's state-controlled energy company, Petrobras: developing a group of newly discovered deep-sea oil fields that energy analysts say will catapult this country into the ranks of the world's petro-powers. The oil pools are 200 miles out in the Atlantic and more than four miles down, under freezing seas, rock and a heavy cap of salt.

Petrobras, which until recently was little known outside oil circles, has launched a five-year, $174 billion project to provide platforms, rigs, support vessels and drilling systems to develop tens of billions of barrels of oil. Energy officials here project that Brazil -- still an oil importer five years ago -- will in the next decade have one of the world's biggest oil reserves.

"It's going to change the role of Brazil in the geopolitics of oil," Petrobras's president, José Sergio Gabrielli, said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. "We are going to become a much bigger producer."

Petrobras estimates that production in Brazil could reach 3.9 million barrels by 2020, up from more than 2 million a day now. Proven oil reserves would rise from 14.4 billion barrels to more than 30 billion barrels, according to government estimates, putting Brazil in the same league as such major oil exporters as Qatar, Canada, Kazakhstan and Nigeria.

...

In an era of drum-tight supply, the discoveries off Brazil's coast and Petrobras's growing stature are changing the world's oil balance, because few regions outside the OPEC countries are expected to generate significant growth in crude production, said Michelle Billig Patron, senior director of political risk for the New York-based Pira Energy Group.

"There is really only Canada and Brazil when you're talking about a million barrels a day more in growth over the next 10 years," Patron said.

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The US could easily top that production if the Democrats would get out of the way and quit strangling domestic production of offshore wells and resources in Alaska. They are now looking for reasons to not explore for shale gas. The anti energy left in the Democrat party is costing us jobs and royalties from production that could substantially reduce our deficit.