Petrobras As Brazil’s Moon Landing

The Rio de Janeiro deep ocean oil discoveries of 2007 have been Brazil’s one giant leap forward.

Between 1959 and 1969, the U.S. government’s budget for the space program was over $225 billion (2007 dollars) and the beloved Apollo program was $136 billion. Walking on the moon was America’s outdoing the Russian cosmonauts. It was also a testament to what has become known as American exceptionalism. Some country’s have it. Some do not.

Brazil has it.

Investors and wild adventurers from Jacques Custeau to Sir Richard Branson have all said that deep sea exploration is really Earth’s next big mission. We can explore bottom of the ocean before man can explore Mars. And what we will find at the bottom of the ocean is likely to be something everyone wants: oil.

Brazilian oil company Petrobras found it; about four years ago now, deep off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, miles below sea level, and just as further beneath the salty bedrock of the Atlantic Ocean. The Santos Basin is estimated to hold up to 40 billion barrels of oil. Petrobras found it. It was Brazil’s lunar landing.

Within the next 10 years, the oil and gas industry around the world will invest an estimated $3 trillion exploring and drilling for oil. Of that, around a third will be invested in Brazil. Over the next five years, Petrobras will invest more on deep sea oil — $224.7 billion total, according to the company – than NASA spent in 10 years on the Apollo mission.

Deep water drilling is expensive. Pre-salt drilling requires advanced technologies. It is next to impossible to see beneath all that  salt. “It’s essentially going out where no driller has gone before,” Jose Valera, a lawyer at Mayer Brown, told the Financial Times this week. “In deep water, it’s a true exploration effort. Now we’re discovering these tremendous resources. That truly is a new frontier.”

Around 40% of the Santos Basin has been auctioned off with another 60% yet to go. Some wells have been dry. But based on what Petrobras has confirmed so far, Brazil is likely to go from the 19th largest oil producer on earth to the fifth. That will put it close to Venezuela, one of the top five oil producers for the U.S.

Petrobras’ oil discovery will do as much for Brazil economically as the Apollo mission did for American science. Petrobras’ oil wells in the Atlantic aren’t a temporary national buzz like the FIFA World Cup coming to Brazil in 2014, or even the Summer Olympic Games in 2016. This is permament, long term good news for Brazil.

“Brazil’s entire economy will benefit greatly from what Petrobras discovered in the ocean,” says Pedro Cordeiro, an oil and gas sector analyst at Bain & Company in Rio. “Brazil is what Norway was 34 years ago just before the North Sea discoveries. Prior to that, Norway’s biggest export was cod fish. Now they produce about 2.2 million barrels of oil a day. Brazil will produce around 2.5 million barrels a day. Norway’s entire deep sea oil technology know-how expanded and they export more of that now than they do oil. They built their oil industry up from scratch and it is now one of the oil centers of the world.” Brent crude oil pricing is based primarily on Norwegian oil. “That’s where Rio is heading. It’s going to become the new Houston.”

Petrobras is majority owned by the government, but outside of the U.S. and Europe it is one of the only foreign oil markets that allows foreign investors to come in and drill baby drill. Every oil major is in Brazil because of the Santos Basin despite having to partner with Petrobras and ceding 30% of that partnership to the Brazilian oil giant.  Every major drilling service firm is there even if they are up against government incentives that favor growing out the local players. They are there because they have to be. The oil rich Middle East is mostly closed to private companies.  Brazil in the 2000s is as good as it gets. The sector is so hot, that when OGX Petroleo, run by Forbes billionaire Eike Batista, did an initial public offering for his company in 2008, it brought in nearly $5 billion from investors and it had not even discovered a drop of oil.

“Petrobras’s discovery will be a boon to the Brazilian economy,” says Cordeiro from his office in Cinelândia, a Rio neighborhood visited by President Barack Obama in March. “You’re looking at about a trillion reals ($555 billion) in infrastructure needed and I estimate that a good 40% of that money will be just for the oil and gas industry,” he says. “Oil and gas is important, but there will be a lot of value added investment because of this discovery in areas like biofuels or even biofuels technology.”

Brazil might not always get it right. They’re constantly proposing new oil royalty changes that can irk foreign oil companies, even Petrobras, which also has to pay them. The government’s National Petroleum Agency wants to auction off more oil fields by the second half of 2012, it’s first auction since 2007. The current royalty dispute between the states clamoring for their share of the bounty is slowing things down as much as the BP oil spill slowed production in the Gulf of Mexico.

That’s ordinary Brazilian politics. Petrobras is facing extraordinary challenges. But this is one program, and one big multinational, that politics in Brazil won’t ever undermine.