MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Repsol, Ecopetrol and 17 other oil firms cleared for Brazil's next pre-salt auction

The ANP clarified that inclusion on the list does not mean the companies will submit bids

Nineteen oil companies, among them Spain's Repsol and Colombia's Ecopetrol, have been cleared to bid in the upcoming auction of licenses to partner with the Brazilian State in the exploitation of hydrocarbons in the pre-salt, the country's main crude reserve. The list was released on Friday by the National Agency for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP), following its publication in the Official Gazette.

It is the fourth cycle of the Permanent Offer of Production Sharing, whose public session is scheduled for October 7, the same day the ANP will also hold a concessions cycle with other areas. Through production-sharing contracts, applied to the pre-salt, the awarded companies exploit the fields together with the Brazilian State, which keeps a share of the extracted oil. The pre-salt, located beneath a thick layer of salt in ultra-deep waters of the Atlantic off the Brazilian coast, holds the largest reserves discovered in the country in recent decades and is considered the driver of national production growth.

In addition to Repsol and Ecopetrol, the list includes companies such as Britain's BP, the US Chevron, the Anglo-Dutch Shell, France's TotalEnergies, Norway's Equinor, Portugal's Galp Energia and Petrogal, China's CNOOC and Sinopec, Australia's Karoon, Kuwait's Kufpec, Malaysia's Petronas and Qatar's QatarEnergy. Repsol is registered both individually and through Repsol Sinopec Brasil, created with China's Sinopec. Among the qualified Brazilian companies are Petrobras, the main pre-salt operator, as well as 3R Petroleum Offshore and PRIO.

The ANP clarified that inclusion on the list does not mean the companies will submit bids. To do so, they must formally express their interest and provide the guarantees required by the regulator by July 21, either individually or in a consortium. The tender contemplates up to 23 exploratory blocks available in the Campos and Santos offshore basins, though the ANP specified that on August 6 it will announce which of those areas received expressions of interest and will actually be offered in October.

The fifteen companies that were already qualified were joined by four new ones in this cycle: Galp Energia Brasil, Kufpec E&P Brasil, Repsol Exploração Brasil and Repsol Sinopec Brasil. The Permanent Offer has become the main mechanism for tendering exploration and production areas in Brazil, which aims to rank among the world's five largest oil exporters by the end of the decade, in large part thanks to pre-salt production.