While Pelosi-Obama-Reid continue to keep their heads buried in desert sand, Brazil is showing there is lots of oil in the continental shelf.
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently marveled at the stupidity of Democrats in not doing what every sensible American wants done: Drill our way out of high prices and dependence on the Middle East and Venezauela.
American oil reserves have been in decline because Democrats in Congress have banned new exploration and development for decades.
Brazil’s oil reserves are soaring because Brazil is developing its own resources. Even its European partners are benefitting.
As new discoveries are made, the estimate of new reserves for Brazil are going up. Speculation now centers around 50 billion barrels of new oil in Brazil’s offshore region. That’s five times Brazil’s reserves as of last year (11 billion) and 2½ times all of the reserves of the U.S (21 billion).
Yet the estimates for banned areas offshore the U.S., in ANWR and in Rocky Mountain shale exceed one trillion barrels of oil or oil equivalents. The results of this failure to drill are high prices for gas, home heating oil and jet fuel and crude oil itself and unhealthy dependence on hostile and unstable oil producers.
The number one exporter of oil to the U.S. is Canada. Canada, like Brazil, has been aggressively exploring and developing its own natural resources. Canada has been building its reserves even as production in mature oil fields is flattening or declining. That’s fortunate for the U.S., since Canadian oil exports to the U.S. have been growing to help support economic growth.
Here’s the most recent news out of Brazil:
Galp Advances After Making New Oil Find in Brazil
By Joao Lima
Aug. 8 (Bloomberg) -- Galp Energia SGPS SA, Portugal's biggest oil company, rose in Lisbon trading after finding light crude oil in a deepwater well in Brazil's Santos Basin, the location of the biggest discovery in the Americas since 1976. …
Tupi is the largest oil discovery in the Americas since Mexico's Cantarell field was found in 1976, and compares with the 12 billion barrels held at Kazakhstan's Kashagan field, the largest oil find in the last three decades.
Petroleo Brasileiro SA, Brazil's state-controlled oil company, is the operator and owns 65 percent of the BM-S-11 block where both the Iara and Tupi wells were drilled. BG owns 25 percent and Galp owns 10 percent.
Estimated Reserves
``Given the discovery, recoverable reserves on block BM-S- 11 could increase to 10 billion barrels from currently 5 billion to 8 billion barrels,'' Kapadia said.
Iara is in Brazil's ``pre-salt'' offshore region, a new oil province that may contain about 50 billion barrels of oil according to Peter Wells, a director at U.K. research company Neftex Petroleum Consultants Ltd. The Iara well, which has yet to be declared commercially viable, is still being drilled in the hope of finding more oil at greater depths.
Some oil industry analysts, including David Thomas from Citigroup Global Markets Inc., have said that Tupi, Tupi Sul and Iara may be linked as part of a larger offshore deposit.
Petrobras in January said that a gas and oil discovery known as Jupiter, in the Santos Basin's BM-S-24 block, could be as big as Tupi. Petrobras owns 80 percent of Jupiter and operates the well. Galp has 20 percent of Jupiter. …
