Brazilian President Inaugurated Deepwater Oil Extraction
Brazilian President ‘Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva inaugurated Tuesday Brazil’s first extraction of oil from deep waters which highlighted techniques to be applied to vast oil fields found even farther offshore at greater depths,’ the AFP reports.
Lula led the ceremony on board the platform P-34, owned by the state-run company Petrobras and located over the Jubarte oil field 77 kilometers (48 miles) off the coast of the Brazilian state of Espirito Santo.
The platform will pump up some 15,000 barrels of oil each day. The oil comes from a depth of 4,4 kilometer (slightly less than three miles) and, most problematically a layer of salt 100 to 200 meters thick.
Although Petrobas is happy it can start drilling in this particular oilfield, it considers the oil platform P-34 to be a ‘test facility for the far greater prize contained in the Santos Basin, an oil-rich zone farther south that lies between 250 and 800 kilometers off the state of Rio de Janeiro.‘
That zone contains the Tupi oil field which was discovered in November of last year. According to estimations, this field contains eight billion barrels of oil; ‘enough to turn Brazil into an oil exporter on par with smaller OPEC countries.’
Other research has given experts the impression that Tupi is only the tip of the iceberg. The Santos Basin probably contains much more oil; so much even so that this zone alone could triple Brazil’s 14 billion barrels of oil reserves.
There is just one minor problem with Tupi; the oil is located seven kilometers under the waves, ‘under a salt layer one kilometer thick.’
Pumping will start next year in the Tupi zone. If it proves to be viable, commercial pumping will start in 2012. If all goes as planned, Brazil will become one of the major oil exporters in the world.
That is good news for Brazil, for South America and for the West; the more oil Brazil produces, the less dependent the West will be on Arab countries that blackmail the West whenever they can and that all too often secretly use oil money to fund terrorist organizations or, at the very least, encourage extremism and radicalism among Moslems.
According to experts, $600 billion will be needed to pump the oil from Brazil’s Atlantic waters. Petrobas already announced it would invest more than $112 billion a while ago, but it has now said it will invest considerably more now that discoveries have led them to believe that there is more oil out there than they originally thought.
It will be interesting to see how Brazil deals with its oil. All too often, countries that produce oil on a large scale become completely dependent on it; they do not develop their economy in other ways. This is also known as the curse of oil. The only thing these countries export is oil, and the money is often not going back to the population as a whole, but only to an already rich and well educated elite.
In other cases the government completely takes over control of the oil fields and of the exploitation of them, which causes its own problems.
President Lula will have to find a better way; Brazil has a great opportunity to enrich itself, to develop itself, and to become a major oil exporter, but only if the government does not allow itself to be blinded by the ‘black gold’ in its Atlantic waters.
