When Pat posted a message asking about oil production in Brazil (http://www.sk.com.br/forum/display_message.php?message_id=28635), I got curious and asked my uncle who works for Petrobras for some insight on the matter.

Petrobras is the state owned company that had the monopoly on oil production in Brazil until a few year ago. Nowadays it's still very strong company either in the extraction business with several oil plataforms in our coast or in the refinary business of which  detains a market share of 95%.

We are "economically" auto-sufficient nowadays. It means that we only import it and we do so because it's more viable. The excess that we export pays all our importation. That is due to quality of oil here: it's not possible to yield a good proportion of diesel or querosene. On the other hand we can get the asphalt among others that americans, for example, are  eager to buy. It's not right to say that our oil is not "good" but just different from the oil produced in other parts of the world.

Our auto-sufficiency was achieved some months ago. We would have it a long time ago if it was't for the disaster that sunk a oil plataform known as P-36. Now we have our new P-50.

The reason that it's not fully advertised is probably due to the presidential election that we will be helding next year . The politics are saving some cards in their pockets so they can say it out loud "WE'RE NOW AUTO-SUFFICIENT" in the right moment.