When news first broke late last year of the discovery of potentially massive deposits of oil and natural gas off the Brazilian coast, Dilma Rousseff, chief of staff to President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and a former energy minister, predicted Brazil would soon become “a new Saudi Arabia”. Others have described the new deep-water fields in Brazil’s south Atlantic as “the North Sea of the South”.
Petrobras, the government-controlled oil company, has tried to avoid such hyperbole. “We can’t put any numbers [on the new fields],” says Sérgio Gabrielli, company president.
