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A
month after the law had been promulgated and the Petrobrás had been
created, Assis Chateaubriand, who was a senator, presented a project to
cancel it. And from that time on, now and then there is an attempt like
that. In 1988, we had a very good campaign. At that time, the president of
Petrobrás was Antonio Maciel, who presides Ford now, and we had a big
support from the great Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, who embraced that campaign
and helped us to raise the oil to the
constitutional level.
Petrobrás
has just completed 50 years. There is a cool story about the discovery of
the Lobato well, in Bahia, when they closed it stating there was no oil
there. Is there a specific responsible for that?
Oscar
Cordeiro was the main mentor of the production. He worked hard in order to
find out oil, investing his own means to achieve that purpose, but he
defended the point of view that the oil should be a private property.
Monteiro Lobato also defended the idea that the oil should belong to
private companies, but the private business defenders missed the most
important : oil production involves lots of money and a state company is a
good solution because you not only can join the government resources but
to get funds easier as well. I think that was a quite important decision,
because when a private owner faces the first difficulty, he sells the
company, in general, to the international trust.
And
their commitment is to the profit and not to the development of the
country, which is one of the main Petrobrás causes...
Exactly.
Do
you consider Brazil is coming closer to be an independent country in the
oil issue?
Yes,
our production is 90% of what we consume, what I personally consider a bad
statistics as well as a future problem. Today the oil has a low price in
the international market, so the ideal situation would be to keep those
supplies till a not far distant future – about 10 years- when the
international prices will go up. Experts in the oil issue say within 10
years the production will begin to decrease after a big increase, and then
the prices will dash, probably duplicating. There is a guess that the
world oil supply is something around one trillion barrels. It happens that
in the last eighties those supplies were increased in a suspicious way,
for two reasons : the country that has oil has also credit, so it has more
probability of getting funds and lower interest rates ; the second is that
members of OPEP (Organization of Oil Exporter Countries) had the right to
export oil proportionally to its supplies. As those supplies were never
checked, each country declared whatever wanted. If we assume a supply of
one trillion world barrels, we are guaranteed for 43 years. But supposing
that amount is not for real, the oil supply might end quite soon.
Does
Petrobrás research alternative models of energy?
Petrobrás
once had a division in the industrial department that researched
alternative sources of energy, but the government obliged it to close that
division, so it stopped the research. And for some time, in spite of our
campaign , we did not succeed.
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