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Brazil Billionaire Delists OGX As National Oil Firms Step Off The Gas
Brazil’s pre-salt oil boom has gone bust, and the first casualty has been Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista’s OGX Petroleo & Gas. OGX officially delisted from the BM&F Bovespa stock exchange on Oct. 30 after filing for bankruptcy protection a few hours before. And now national oil firm Petrobras is divesting in order to help it invest in a deep sea project that cost more than anyone imagined.
OGX’s founding father, Eike Batista, was once Brazil’s first oil billionaire with a fortune estimated by FORBES to be around $30 billion. Today, his net worth is around $900 million. All lost because of oil bets. His Brazilian blowout cost investors $3.6 billion, with California based PIMCO being the biggest foreign holders of OGX debt.
The default is the largest corporate bankruptcy in Latin American history.
Of the 73 companies listed on the Bovespa, OGX was one of the most hotly traded, trailing the mega caps like Vale and Petrobras and financial powerhouses Itau, Bradesco and Banco do Brasil.
When OGX listed on the Bovespa back in June 2008, Goldman Sachs was busy forecasting oil prices of $200 a barrel [cheating??] and Petrobras shares shooting to $60. Boy were they wrong. And while hindsight is 20-20, at the time of the IPO Batista’s private oil firm, the only one in Brazil, was the hottest public offering in the Americas. The stock lost 99.3% of its value between then and now, according to Economatica.
As recent as last year, Batista cheerleaded OGX into greater oil finds, at least on paper. The oil guesstimates went terribly wrong. Batista had estimated as much as 10 billion barrels of oil equivalent deep under the sand, salt and rock of the Atlantic Ocean off coastal São Paulo. OGX ended up tapping dry wells, coming nowhere near the production estimates set by the company.
The entire sector over-invested in oil and oversold its prospects to the market.
Since Petrobras discovered oil deep under water six years ago, oil firms from around the world were quick to consider Brazil’s Atlantic a Saudi Arabia Waterworld.
Over the last several months, Brazilian state run oil firm Petrobras has been divesting its assets outside of the country in order to handle the billions in debt it’s accrued to invest in complicated drilling technology and services to get to that pre-salt oil, thousands of feet below the sand. It’s divested out of Argentina and on Wednesday it announced that it sold its entire collection of Peru assets to PetroChina for $2.6 billion.
Petrobras is shrinking, all in an effort to keep its pre-salt dreams alive.
When Maria Graças Foster took over Petrobras in 2012, Petrobras had operations in 23 countries. Today, they are in 17 countries, including in the Gulf of Mexico, United States. Petrobras has already closed 15 offices internationally and plans on closing 38 more within the next two years, Agencia Estado newswire reported.
Petrobras is turning inward out of necessity. The pre-salt oil is too costly for the company to invest as much as it had overseas prior to the 2007 discoveries. For the International Energy Agency, Brazil is eventually going to become the sixth largest oil producer in the world. According to the IEA, Brazil will produce nearly a third of all the new oil production worldwide by 2035.
But to do that, Petrobras will have to invest billions in new technology to dig that oil out of the bedrock below the surface of the sea. And the government will have to be more open to foreigners doing the same.
For now, Brazilians have heard this story about the oil boom before. Despite having all the oil, they pay the equivalent of around $5.10 per gallon of gasoline. And they still have to import gasoline because they don’t have the refining capacity to make it themselves.
Eike Batista believed in the oil boom story, until OGX went bust. He might still believe IEA’s assessment of a Saudi Waterworld a few miles off Copacabana. But Batista at least won’t be a participant in it, except maybe as a shareholder.
IEA said in London this week at the release of their World Energy Outlook report that Brazil should produce six million barrels of oil a day by 2035, up from two million daily today.
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