Bricklayer: Parente sold a pre-salt field worth R$ 22 billion for R$ 8,5 billion.

By Fernando Brito, editor of brick 

The Michel Temer government and the manager he placed at Petrobras, the former minister of the blackout Pedro Parente, have today taken more from Petrobras than all the embezzlements by Paulo Roberto Costa, Pedro Barusco, Nestor Cerveró and all the other rats who gnawed at Petrobras' money in the cases investigated by Operation Lava Jato.

The sale of the Carcará oil field to the Norwegian company Statoil is a disaster that can be explained with a very basic calculation.

Even at $50 a barrel, fields like Carcará – where studies have already pointed to production exceeding 35 barrels per day per well – represent a lower cost than the already fantastic average of $8 per barrel achieved in the pre-salt layer. After paying royalties (Carcará predates the production-sharing law), taxes, transportation costs, and everything else, it's a very conservative estimate to predict a profit of $5 per barrel. It could even be double that.

Carcará had reservoir rock columns up to four times larger than Sapinhoá (formerly Guará), and its western half, where the wells are located, has roughly the same area. Sapinhoá has a measured reserve of 2,1 billion barrels of recoverable oil, that is, oil that can be extracted.

It can therefore be bigger, much bigger.

But if Guará has the same, just the same, do the math: a profit of more than 10 billion dollars, at five dollars per barrel.

Or R$33 billion, at today's exchange rate. Since Petrobras held 66%, two-thirds, of the area, that's R$22 billion.

It could be more, much more; this is a conservative estimate.

This field was sold for R$ 8,5 billion, half paid upfront and half conditional on the absorption of neighboring areas, within a process known in the industry as "unitization," where the concessionaire acquires areas in which, even outside the original exploration block, the oil reserve extends within the same geological formation.

Since the estimated value of the embezzlement at Petrobras was around R$ 6,2 billion, according to the generous calculations made for the approval of its financial statements, this represents a loss equivalent to more than two Lava Jato operations.

This does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on drilling the three exploratory wells – far more expensive than normal production wells – and on the geological studies and surveys conducted to determine the "map" of the reserve.

I reproduce, definitively, the phrase of Professor Roberto Moraes"What is legal can be far more harmful than what is illegal."

Yesterday, Parente urged haste in finalizing the inheritance law. Today, he sold Carcará.

This made Petrobras the only oil company in the world that says it doesn't want a guaranteed spot in the best oil fields discovered this century. It made it the only one that gives away, at bargain prices, what it already had of the "prime" oil reserves of the pre-salt layer.

PS. To learn more about Carcará, see posts on this blog. here, here, here, here e here.