Brazilian Oil Hits Keep Coming
By
Toby Shute
October 3, 2008
|
Chalk up two more gushers for the ongoing oil bonanza down Rio way. This week, both Petrobras (NYSE: PBR) and Anadarko Petroleum (NYSE: APC) reported hitting pay dirt off the coast of Brazil.
Petrobras, in case you missed our pieces on past prodigious prizes, has been stringing together a series of serious hits. Just weeks ago, one of my colleagues was fawning over a potential 4-billion-barrel find.
Well, the company's moved a bit further up the coastline and hit hydrocarbons offshore Bahia state, along with El Paso (NYSE: EP) and two other partners. At a water depth of 495 meters (1,624 feet), this discovery shouldn't prove terribly challenging or expensive to exploit, if commercial quantities are indeed found to exist. It's the deeper stuff down south that's got Petrobras rushing to round up recently built rigs from the likes of Transocean (NYSE: RIG) and Noble (NYSE: NE).
Anadarko, along with Devon Energy (NYSE: DVN) and some local partners, dished out some discovery news of its own. Anadarko characterized its Campos Basin find as "pre-salt." Does that mean the oil predates the dinner-table staple in geologic time? No, it just means that the oil zone lies below a thick salt layer. It took seismic players like Schlumberger (NYSE: SLB) a while to figure out how to "see" below this salt, but the technology's come a long way.
With every passing discovery, I get more reassured about my bullishness on the deepwater drillers. I don't really care if oil's at $60 or $120 -- significant offshore development is moving ahead in either case.
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