Brazil oil company confirms light-oil well discovery

Brazil's state-owned oil and gas giant Petrobras confirmed on Wednesday the discovery of a significant amount of light oil in the Santos Basin off the coast of the country's Sao Paulo state.

The confirmation was made after the company conducted tests in a vertical well and detected a flow of 4,900 barrels of oil and 150,000 cubic meters of natural gas per day. The highly productive reservoir was found under a 2,000-meter thick layer of salt, also known as pre-salt.

Petrobras said it would make further investigations to determine the total oil and gas reserve of the well.

According to experts, a reservoir that lies underneath a layer of pre-salt is commercially viable if its total capacity exceeds 700 million barrels. Although drilling a well of this kind required a big investment, it was worthwhile because the rewards would be high, said Marcio Rocha, a geologist from the Brazilian Association of Petroleum Geologists.

There may be other wells below the pre-salt layers in the deep waters of the Campos Basin in the Rio de Janeiro state, said Rocha.

The new well was discovered during exploration being carried out by a consortium comprising Petrobras, the UKs' BG Group and Portugals' Petrogal.

Source: Xinhua