Brazil's discovery of an oil reserve in the Santos Basin in the south of the country will not stop Brazil from investing in biofuels, according to Brazilian President, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. In his radio show Café com o Presidente (Breakfast with the President), Lula guaranteed that Brazil will not abandon biofuels due to the new oil field.
"On the contrary, the matter of biofuels plays two important roles. The first one is to increase the importance of Brazil to the global energy matrix that we wish to build, in order to fight pollution in the planet. We all are aware of global warming, and we all know that petroleum is one of the causes of this problem. Therefore, we will keep on investing in biofuels," he said.
"The world will inevitably need to adopt a mix of biofuel into oil. We have already been mixing ethanol into it, a 25% mix is already used in Brazil. Europe has decided to mix 10% by 2020. And in January we will start mixing 2% of biodiesel into diesel oil.
"Afterwards, we are going to increase to five, then ten, and by the time everyone is doing it, then we will be able to reduce carbon emission, and generate millions of jobs in Brazil, Latin America and Africa, which has a huge area available for planting, and we will also help family agriculture," stated the president.
The discovery of the reserve was announced last week by Brazilian state-controlled oil company Petrobras. According to the president of the company, Sergio Gabrielli, the oil and natural gas field at the Santos Basin shall include Brazil among the world's ten leading oil producing countries.
According to him, the reserves, estimated to be between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels, will earn the country the eighth or ninth position in the global ranking.
ABr
