Government Fails to Benefit Blocking Oil Firms: Corporate Brazil
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International oil companies looking to start exploring Brazil, home to the largest discoveries in the past decade, can’t get near the crude.
Brazil has repeatedly delayed the sale of exploration areas since 2007, leaving Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell Plc shut out of an offshore area that holds at least $5 trillion of oil. Meanwhile Petroleo Brasileiro SA, the state-run company that pumps more than 90 percent of the country’s crude, is struggling to develop deposits it has already found. Petrobras’s output grew 1.5 percent in 2011, the slowest pace in four years.