Brazil offshore oil fields all in home waters

The massive oil reserves found off Brazil under a geological layer of salt all lie within Brazilian waters, the head of the country’s top oil company Petrobras said.

The “pre-salt area is in Brazilian waters,” Petrobras chief executive Jose Sergio Gabrielli told a press conference in London.

Brazil has decided to put the offshore fields, estimated to hold up to 50 billion barrels of oil, under tighter state control, counting on the resources to help propel it forward as one of the major powers of this century.

“I don’t know if I will live to see it but Brazil has to transform itself into a big power in the 21st century. We have everything to make it happen. We are not talking about a little country here,” President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva told AFP in an interview earlier this month.