July 14 (Bloomberg) -- A Brazilian oil well drilled by Exxon Mobil Corp. that showed no sign of oil was a “one off,” according to Nelson Narciso Filho, director of Brazil’s National Petroleum Agency.

Drilling at the Tupi field in Brazil’s offshore Santos Basin will probably provide more information about the viability of the country’s so-called pre-salt oil fields, Narciso said in an interview in London today. Exxon Mobil said last week it failed to find oil or natural gas in the offshore Guarani well in the sub-sea block known as BM-S-22.

“This is a one off,” Narciso said. “The risk is always there but we don’t see it as a problematic situation for the pre-salt area.”

Investment in Brazilian oil and gas over the next five years will total about $200 billion, including $174 billion in spending by state-controlled oil producer Petroleo Brasileiro SA and $26 billion from foreign companies, Narciso said today.

Petrobras, as the Rio de Janeiro-based oil company is known, is focusing spending on oil exploration and production, including the pre-salt fields.

Brazil’s government expects to hold a new round of auctions for its oil blocks by the end of the year, the director of ANP, as the oil regulator is known, said today. Pre-salt fields won’t be included in the bidding because the government is still creating rules to regulate the area, Narciso said.

Pre-Salt Region

The pre-salt area runs 800 kilometers (500 miles) along Brazil’s coast and has oil deposits beneath a layer of salt resting as much as 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) beneath the ocean surface and another 3,000 to 5,000 meters below the seabed.

Petrobras’s second-quarter earnings won’t be affected by the failure to discover oil in the well, and the company isn’t likely to reduce its planned investments, analysts at Raymond James Latin America said in a note today. Raymond James reiterated its “market perform” recommendation on Petrobras.

“There is no earnings impact for Petrobras,” Raymond James analysts including Felipe Santos said in a note today. “This dry well ends what so far has been a 100 percent success ratio. In spite of this negative finding by its partner, the potentiality to find new oil and gas reserves and augment production is huge.”

Hess Write-off

New York-based Hess Corp. said last week it will write off its investment in the well, without identifying how much will be charged to its second-quarter earnings. Exxon Mobil is in talks with Petrobras to borrow Seadrill Ltd.’s West Polaris deepwater rig to drill the next well, Patrick McGinn, an Exxon Mobil spokesman, said last week in a statement.

Guarani was the second well drilled by the Exxon-led group in a sub-sea region 10 times the size of Los Angeles. It is home to the Western Hemisphere’s largest crude discovery in three decades. The Tupi field has an estimated 5 billion to 8 billion barrels of oil and gas, Petrobras said earlier this year.

Petrobras’s preferred shares fell 0.7 percent to 29.59 reais in Sao Paulo trading today. Exxon Mobil rose 0.8 percent to $66.22 while Hess climbed 1.5 percent to $49.35 in New York.

-- With assistance from Joe Carroll in Chicago. Editor: Robin Saponar, Jessica Brice.

To contact the reporters on this story: Laura Price in London at lprice3@bloomberg.netJuan Pablo Spinetto in London at jspinetto@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: July 14, 2009 16:58 EDT