According to recent data and forecasts from Rystad Energy, Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras, is on track to become the world’s largest oil producer among publicly listed companies by 2030. Earlier this month, Brazil held an oil deposit auction on four blocks with the hopes of receiving interest from international exploration and production companies. The results of the auction were underwhelming with only two of the four blocks being sold and many of the world’s biggest oil firms not participating. This led to Petrobras being the sole winner of the Itapu block, while being a ninety percent stakeholder in the Buzios block with Chinese state-owned oil firm CNOOC and CNODC owning the remaining ten percent.
Petrobras gained nearly full control of more than eight billion barrels of oil in the Buzios field. Throughout this year, Petrobras has evolved from fifth place to become the third-largest public exploration and production companies, behind Russia’s Rosneft and China’s PetroChina, reaching output of around 2.2 million barrels per day by the end of the third quarter. According to Aditya Ravi, Vice President of Rystad Energy’s upstream team specializing in E & P activities in Latin America, “We predict that Petrobras alone can boost its production numbers by more than 1.3 million barrels per day over the next decade.” With their recent acquisition, Petrobras is not only poised to potentially surpass Rosneft and PetroChina, but it also has indicated that it wishes to join OPEC. As it stands, Brazil’s current output would make it OPEC’s third largest producer, behind Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
