Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company, is in direct talks with governments including Washington and Beijing to help finance the $174bn development of its huge reserves.
The partially traded group recently discovered the biggest oil fields in Latin America in the past 30 years and industry leaders, such as Tony Hayward, BP’s chief executive, believe the waters off Brazil’s south-eastern coast hold oil reserves as big and important as those discovered in the North Sea in the 1970s.
