Brazil starts exploitation of major oil reserves

A welder on the job in the shipyard of Angra Dos Reis, Brazil, where workers are building enormous oil platforms that will feature 14,000-ton decks the size of football fields.

Once the offshore pools of oil are tapped, Brazil's proven oil reserves are expected to double. (Juan Forero/the Washington Post)

The challenge facing Brazil's state-controlled energy company, Petrobras is huge: developing a group of newly discovered deep-sea oil fields that will catapult this country into the ranks of the world's petro-powers.

The oil pools are 200 miles out in the Atlantic and more than four miles down, under freezing seas, rock and a heavy cap of salt.

Petrobras has launched a five-year, $174 billion project to provide platforms, rigs, support vessels and drilling systems to develop tens of billions of barrels of oil. Energy officials here project that Brazil, over the next decade, will have one of the world's biggest oil reserves.

"It's going to change the role of Brazil in the geopolitics of oil," Petrobras's president, José Sergio Gabrielli, said in an interview at the company's headquarters in Rio de Janeiro. "We are going to become a much bigger producer."

Petrobras estimates that production in Brazil could reach 3.9 million barrels by 2020, up from more than 2 million a day now. Proven oil reserves would rise from 14.4 billion barrels to more than 30 billion barrels, according to government estimates, putting Brazil in the same league as such major oil exporters as Qatar, Canada, Kazakhstan and Nigeria.

The new discoveries in Brazil's offshore "pre-salt" region do not mean that the country will become a major exporter of crude, according to Gabrielli. He noted that Brazil's economy, which is the world's eighth-largest and is steadily growing, is expected to consume much of Petrobras's projected production.

Iran: Brazil Enjoying Closer Nuclear Co-operation

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defended closer ties with Brazil Friday, hinting at a bilateral nuclear cooperation ahead of a state visit.

Ahmadinejad stressed the "need for cooperation between the two countries in various fields," according to a statement distributed here by the Iranian embassy.

"While there is an unfair polemic in Western countries against Iran's peaceful nuclear program, the people of Brazil side with the Iranian people."

Pointing to Brazil's own nuclear program, Ahmadinejad said Brazilians "understand that a few arrogant powers... are trying to prevent other nations from having access to advanced science."

Ahmadinejad arrives in Brazil on Monday for a busy day-long visit that includes a meeting with President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, signing bilateral trade deals, a visit to Congress, a press conference and a speech at a Brasilia university, according to the embassy.

It will be the first visit by an Iranian president to Brazil, and Ahmadinejad's third round of talks with Lula, who is scheduled to visit Tehran in early 2010.

Israel, whose conservative government considers Ahmadinejad-ruled Iran an existential threat, has already blasted Brazil's "mistake" in hosting the firebrand leader.

Brazil has backed Iran's nuclear development program, as long as it serves peaceful, civilian uses. Lula told AFP in September that he was against sanctions on Iran, preferring instead diplomacy.

His stance contrasts with the United States, its Western allies and Israel, which charge that Tehran is seeking to develop a nuclear bomb under the cover of its suspect nuclear program.

World powers are engaged in long-running efforts to persuade Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions but in the latest setback, Tehran has rejected a proposed nuclear fuel deal.

The Iranian leader called for Brasilia's cooperation on Middle East concerns, as Brazil seeks to boost its international profile to match its growing economic heft.

"If the Brazilian people and the Iranian people are united on issues such as the Zionist regime's cruel attack on the defenseless people of Gaza, this will show a mutual desire" for peace, Ahmadinejad said.

He was referring to the 22-day Israeli offensive in the Gaza Strip that ended in January, killing some 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

Ahmadinejad's stop in Brazil, part of a broader Latin American tour to boost its influence in the region, comes just over a week after Lula hosted Israeli President Shimon Peres.

'New' H1N1 Brazilian flu strain! Don't panic - false alarm

Take a jumpy media, throw in a statement hastily translated from Portuguese, and what have you got? A "new" and potentially deadly strain of H1N1 influenza in Brazil, according to a rash of news stories that appeared earlier today.

"It was not yet known whether the new strain was more aggressive than the current A(H1N1) virus which has been declared pandemic by the World Health Organization," reported Agence France Presse, setting the mood for a new round of pandemic panic.

But this "new" strain is nothing of the sort. In fact, the sequence of its gene for the haemagglutinin surface protein, deposited in the GenBank database, is the same as isolates from several other countries.

"There is nothing new and surprising about it. It is identical to the others," said Richard Webby of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

The scare seems to be based on a misunderstanding of a "technical note" posted on the website of the Adolfo Lutz Institute in Saõ Paulo. It states that researchers led by Terezinha Maria de Paiva sequenced the haemagglutinin and matrix protein genes from a virus isolated from a 26-year-old man who was hospitalized in Brazil in April after a trip to Mexico, finding subtle differences for the haemagglutinin gene from a single reference strain of H1N1 isolated in California.

The note doesn't mention that the sequence is the same as other isolates found elsewhere. Even so, subtle changes from a single reference strain are nothing to get terribly excited about, given the normal rates of mutation in influenza viruses. "It's what you'd expect for influenza," says Adolfo García-Sastre of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.