Surprise discovery off coast of Brazil may confound the oil and gas doom-mongers

BG declined to comment but sources close to the business – formerly a part of state-owned British Gas – said it was too early to make estimates of how much oil or gas was contained within the Carioca reservoir. “More evaluation [by drilling] is needed,” said one well-informed source.

Matthew Shaw, Latin American energy analyst with Edinburgh-based oil consultant Wood Mackenzie, said: “I don’t know how he calculates that. It [the 33bn barrels number] is not credible. This is an unfortunate slip of the tongue by a senior member of the NPA. It is likely to be a fairly modest discovery with a few hundred million barrels in place.”
Shaw said the unfortunate comments were symptomatic of the “oil fever” that was sweeping Brazil in the aftermath of recent – and confirmed – world-class discoveries such as Tupi, another field where BG has a stake and which has got between five and eight billion recoverable reserves.

Those figures are 10 to 16 times bigger than BG’s Buzzard discovery in the North Sea which led to new optimism about the UK’s own offshore potential and helped revive drilling interest in the area at a time when local crude prices have been hitting new highs.

Guardian