Petrobras

"...Petrobras is already the biggest company in Brazil, with a market value of more than $240 billion, and it is the government's largest single taxpayer. It employs some 52,000 workers, but the new oil find has kindled optimism that new jobs and opportunities lay ahead, especially in the shipping industry in ports along the Atlantic coast... Last November, Petrobras announced its discovery of the Tupi field, which holds an estimated 5 to 8 billion barrels of oil. In September, the company said that the nearby Iara field holds up to 4 billion barrels. But analysts estimate that the region could contain up to 80 billion barrels, about the same as Venezuela. Brazil currently produces more than 2 million barrels a day. By 2015, that could increase to 3 million... When Petrobras began operations in 1954, it was producing just 2,700 barrels a day, less than 3 percent of the country's needs. Brazil remained a heavy crude importer over the next two decades, but the oil shock of the 1970s unfurled a technological fervor. Unlike Mexico, whose discovery of the Cantarell field in 1976 – one of the world's largest oil reserves – thrust it easily into oil exportation, most of Brazil's richest deposits were offshore. "We learned early that to be successful we had to have technological domain," says Carlos Tadeu da Costa Fraga, the executive manager of Cenpes, which was created in 1955 and today, with 2,000 employees, is the largest research center in Latin America. "In deep waters, we have much more experience than other countries in the world." In the 1970s, Petrobras developed equipment and techniques to pump oil that lay deeper than most other companies could reach at the time. And today a new task is at hand as Brazil gets set to tap its newest oil find, which sits at some of the deepest levels in the world – more than 7,000 meters under the ocean's surface. But investment in technology is only part of the story. In 1997, Brazilian lawmakers created a concession model, opening up what had been a monopoly to outsiders who compete with Petrobras on bidding and developing leases. Its shares have been publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange since 2000. The government owns the majority of voting shares, but today 70 percent of total equity is in the hands of private investors, making it much more responsive to global accounting standards and corporate governance..."-- Leia mais: http://www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title=Brazil+as+a+new+kind+of+oil+giant+|+csmonitor.com&expire=&urlID=32435054&fb=Y&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.csmonitor.com%2F2008%2F1114%2Fp01s04-woam.html&partnerID=309791