11/11/2025
🔥😱🔥 *Welcome to the planet’s newest oil frontier*
- *Off Brazil’s northeastern coast, where the sediment-heavy water of the vast Amazon River tips out into the Atlantic, are two very different types of treasure. The first is an ecological gem: a 3,600 square-mile deepwater coral reef discovered less than a decade ago. The second treasure puts the first in immediate danger. Billions of barrels of oil may lie in the ancient sediments beneath the seabed, and licenses have just been approved to drill there.*
- Brazil’s role as host of the COP30 climate conference, which is supposed to be a landmark summit where countries set out goals to radically reduce planet-heating pollution, adds a particular dissonance to this oil surge.
- *Brazil is a superstar*: the region’s largest oil and gas producer. Production has “reached levels that have never been seen in the region,” Monaldi said. This is in large part due to ultra-deep “pre-salt” oil reserves discovered in 2006 buried under thick layers of ancient salt beneath the ocean.
- *Ultra-deep water and strong currents mean any oil spill could quickly be swept across miles of ocean and coastline, and the remoteness of the drilling location from large settlements could delay clean-up operations, said ARAYARA’s International Institute - Figueiredo de Oliveira.*
- *Approving drilling here mere weeks before the start of COP30 in the city of Belém — known as the gateway to the Amazon — presents tricky optics for Brazil, which is trying to walk a tightrope between environmental champion and fossil fuel power*.
- *The country’s mighty rivers and abundant rains mean most of its electricity comes from clean hydroelectric power. Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has presided over a sharp decline in deforestation and an increase in renewables*.
- *But Lula has always been pro-oil, Figueiredo de Oliveira said. He greeted Brazil’s big pre-salt discovery, made during his previous presidential term, with the words, “God is Brazilian.” A famous photo shows him raising oil-drenched hands at a Petrobras event in 2010.*
The region is seeing a boom in fossil fuels just as the impacts of the climate crisis really bite. It’s raising thorny questions about who gets to benefit from planet-heating oil.
