Brazil's remaining petroleum potential - State of the art 2023

Abstract

Petroleum and its byproducts will continue to be humankind’s primary energy source for at least 50 years. Brazil is already one of the main suppliers of this raw material and it will continue as such for the next decades. Several large sedimentary basins in Brazil are practically untouched by exploration, especially in the deep and ultra-deepwater realms. There are also large tracts of unexplored areas in basins that already have discoveries, reserves and production of hydrocarbons. The objective of this work is to make predictions about the remaining petroleum potential of the Brazilian basins. The predictions are made based on the big data bank acquired by the petroleum industry in Brazil in the last 83 years, based on the most updated concepts in petroleum geology and, mainly, based on my 45 years of experience as an explorationist. Our final forecast for the remaining petroleum potential of Brazil lies in the range of 50-100 billion barrels of oil equivalent recoverable (boer) (prospective resources, already identified or not, but still needed to be discovered). The basins that will contribute the most to realizing this potential are Santos/Campos, Pará-Maranhão/Foz do Amazonas/Barreirinhas, Pelotas and Paraná; besides, in a lesser scale, but still significant, SergipeAlagoas, Espírito Santo, Camamu-Almada, Solimões and Parnaíba. We are perfectly aware that Geology is a complex and astounding science. New data, innovative new technologies and creative concepts never formulated before can quickly destroy these predictions, for better or worse.