Chevron and Brazil's oil industry
20.05.12
After the 4.9m-barrel spill from the Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, oil regulators around the world are in no mood for leniency. But the blitz against Chevron, for a leak of no more than 3,000 barrels, makes some industry-watchers wonder whether Brazil wants foreign oil companies at all. “The reactions are out of proportion with the size of the leak,” says José Goldemberg, an energy and environment specialist at the University of São Paulo. Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil giant, holds a minority stake in Frade, but none of the lawsuits or fines names it as a respondent. “I don’t think there would have been the same enthusiasm for big fines if Petrobras had been drilling.”
Brazil ended Petrobras’s monopoly and opened up its oil industry to private and foreign investment in the 1990s. But its recent oil policy has been “nationalist and populist”, says Adriano Pires, a Rio-based energy consultant and former ANP official. It has restricted foreign companies to secondary roles in most new projects. A law approved in 2010 requires that in the recently discovered ultra-deep (“sub-salt”) fields, Petrobras must be the operator with a minimum 30% stake (existing concessions are unaffected). Mr Pires fears that Chevron’s mishandling of communications will only harden the new mood. The company was slow to make details of the accident public, he says, and arrogant when it did; press conferences in English went down particularly badly. “It gave the authorities another chance to claim that foreign oil companies drilling in Brazil act carelessly,” he laments.
Source: The Economist