"There are definitely positive signs," said Fadel Gheit, energy analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. in New York, speaking generally about Petrobras' prospects. But he cautioned: "Just because you bought a lottery ticket doesn't mean you will win or get rich."
Petrobras shares have soared in recent years. In 2002, the company's market capitalization was $15 billion. Now it's well over $200 billion.
Given Petrobras' foreign projects, combined with big new oil and gas finds in the Tupi area of Brazil's offshore Santos Basin, the country has a good shot at attaining its goal of surpassing Venezuela and Mexico to become the biggest Latin American oil producer by 2012, with 3.5 million barrels of average daily output worldwide.
"We want to be one of the top five oil companies in the world by then," Oddone da Costa said.
Petrobras was once the monopoly of the Brazilian government but in the 1990s began selling shares to outside investors after Brazil decided to open up the company to foreign money. The government retains a 55% stake.
At the same time, Brazil set up an independent agency to award exploration rights, making Petrobras theoretically just another competitor in the oil patch along with foreign companies. Petrobras is also a major natural gas producer with its holdings in Bolivia, as well as a refiner. It is spending $7 billion on a new refinery in the northeast state of Pernambuco in partnership with PDVSA, the Venezuelan state company.
Its success in deep water, drilling wells as far down as four miles to extract oil in the Campos Basin, has become the stuff of industry legend.
Faced with declining production at its Cantarel offshore oil field in the Gulf of Campeche, Mexico approached Petrobras about helping it drill deeper there. But Petrobras declined because Mexico wouldn't share the reserves or production that Petrobras might find; it just wanted its technology.
"We're not a services company," said Oddone da Costa. "We are an oil company, trying to become larger and larger by discovering and producing oil anywhere we can."
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chris.kraul@latimes.com
