MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Lula da Silva wants more “clean” energy but also “more crude”

PresidentLula da Silva shows the first oil retrieved from a layer of sub-salt on platform P-34 of Petrobras

Brazilian President Lula da Silva said that while his government will continue promoting the use of “clean” energy sources such as ethanol and bio-diesel, he wants government managed oil company Petrobras to press ahead in the search for additional crude.

The more petroleum, the better, but that doesn’t mean we stop investing in bio-diesel and ethanol, because they are two extraordinary energy sources to decontaminate the planet and generate millions of jobs,” Lula da Silva said in his weekly radio address.

He said he was confident Petrobras will discover additional large deposits of oil and gas, making Brazil “ever stronger, ever richer” and providing the nation’s 191 million people with “a better life.”

The president said that burgeoning oil revenue would create “extraordinary potential” to ease poverty and improve education.

“It’s almost the second independence of Brazil,” Lula da Silva said, the same phrase he used last Friday at a ceremony in Rio de Janeiro to mark the beginning of test drilling at Tupi, a new offshore field estimated to contain 5-8 billion barrels of recoverable oil equivalent.

Tupi, located in the Santos Basin some 290 kilometres off the coast of the states of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, is the first field Petrobras has begun to develop in the 800-kilometer-long and 200-kilometer-wide “pre-salt” region.

That region – which also includes the even larger Sugar Loaf field – is so-named because the up to 80 billion barrels of recoverable light crude it is estimated to contain are located under a thick layer of salt far beneath the floor of the Atlantic Ocean.

If the most optimistic forecasts prove correct, Brazil would almost certainly become a major oil exporter.

Brazil is already the world’s leading producer and exporter of sugar-based ethanol and is ramping up to produce bio-diesel.