Two big oil finds in a row for Brazil

Brazil drew oil markets' attention again on Friday when it announced its second major oil find in a week, a field that may be bigger than a 4.5-billion-barrel find announced earlier this week.
The two new finds announced by Brazil's national oil regulator, the ANP, will provide the government with the needed collateral to inject billions of dollars into the state-run oil company Petrobras in exchange for a bigger federal stake in the company.

Petrobras shares were down one per cent at 29.67 reais, despite the news, amid a broader market decline on Friday.
The rights to the federally controlled oil will help Petrobras leverage it into capital to develop Brazil's vast subsalt oil reserves and expand Latin America's mining and farm commodities-rich export profile into hydrocarbons.

Brazil's ANP energy regulator on Wednesday said the 2-ANP-1-RJS well in the Santos Basin, which was drilled by state oil company Petrobras on behalf of the agency, pierced a subsalt field that holds an estimated 4.5 billion barrels of recoverable light crude.

That discovery, known as Franco, was the largest oil find in the world since 2007, when Petrobras announced the biggest ultra-deep find in history with its five-to-eight-billion-barrel Tupi field.
The ANP said on Friday that a second well, named Libra, sunk by Petrobras in the Santos Basin may turn up even more oil than Franco.

The ANP added that the oilfield tapped by the Franco well is not linked to the three-billion to four-billion-barrel Iara field that is controlled by Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras and its partners Portugal's Galp and Britain's BG.