Brazil
's government aim in having a shared
production regime for its sub-salt oil reserves is to maximize oil revenue, the
Estado News Agency reported Wednesday.
"Shared production contracts allow the best appropriation of oil resources
for the government," Haroldo Lima, president of Brazil's oil regulator, ANP, told a
congressional commission on economic development.
Brazil's
sub-salt area has estimated reserves of between 5 billion and 8 billion barrels
of oil.
Lima said the situation most like Brazil was in Russia where areas with the largest
amount of oil used the shared production regime, and areas with the lowest
amounts used the concession system.
Under proposed new laws for the sub-salt area, a production sharing model would
be used, in which the government would own the oil but pay the oil companies
that extract it with part of sales proceeds.
Under Brazil's
current system, oil companies buy concessions in an auction and own the rights
to the oil they produce.
Lima said the
shared production regime also gave government more control over output, so that
it could program the development of its domestic industrial capacity to meet
[oil production] demands.