BRAZIL: Permanent Oil Fields Offering To Begin With 158 Areas - Regulator

(RTTNews) - The Brazilian Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels Agency (ANP) will begin the so-called "permanent offering" of fields and oil blocks with 158 of the 884 potential areas.

Those interested in the areas should be able to present biddings as of July 19, when the edict and contract models must be published.

The permanent offering of oil fields is aimed at allowing companies to make proposals to take fields and blocks of oil returned or uncollected in previous bids without a deadline for doing so.

According to the ANP, as the environmental opinions are issued, the rest of the areas should be included in the public notice, after a new consultation and public hearing to evaluate the additive. The same procedure should be adopted for the withdrawal of the edict of areas that have been later sold.

Dirceu Amorelli, an ANP director, said that the regulator should make available by the end of 2019 around 2,000 exploration blocks of oil for bidding in the form of permanent offering. For him, the decision to keep the areas in a permanent offering is attractive to investors.

"There are mature marketplaces that may be non-commercial for a particularly big company, but it may be commercial for a smaller company," he said, quoted by Agencia Brasil official news agency.