Brazil Just Got a Huge New Oil Field. Or Did It?
Brazil is petitioning the United Nations to extend its territorial waters to include the new oil field, but opinions are divided as to whether the country needs to wait for approval before it can start drilling.
Earlier this year, geologist Pedro Zalan, a consultant to Petrobras, the Brazilian state oil company, analyzed new seismic survey data and calculated that a huge volume of oil is likely buried deep within the seabed, far off the country’s southern coast. The news was at once exciting and worrying for a country distressed by financial and political turmoil. The potential exploitation of this oil poses significant legal, logistical, and environmental challenges that some fear Brazil is not equipped to deal with.
“We have evidence that there is an ongoing trend of weakening of the environmental legislation and inspection in the country,” says Alexander Turra, a biological oceanographer at the University of São Paulo. “So there would be a risk of great losses of biodiversity, fishing potential, and other services this region offers.”
The discovery of so much potential petroleum, which could amount to 20 to 30 billion barrels of recoverable oil, adds to the sizable deposits already known to exist in the region. In 2006, Brazil announced the discovery of at least 40 billion barrels of recoverable oil in the Santos and Campos basins.
The size and economic viability of the new oil field, in a further and deeper section of the Santos basin, still needs to be confirmed by scientific testing, Zalan says. But “if these blocks are auctioned next year, production there could start within eight years.”
The presence of so much potential oil buried so far offshore raises a number of important questions about extraction, spill containment, and perhaps most importantly, whether or not Brazil even has the legal right to claim these fields.
Continue reading.
