Five months before COP30, Brazil auctions oil and gas concessions

This is a fallacy Brazil could have done without: oil would accelerate the country's economic development and thus ultimately finance its energy transition. This doctrine, championed even by President Lula, is taking shape this Tuesday in Rio de Janeiro.

The National Petroleum Agency is holding auctions there to obtain concessions for 172 hydrocarbon exploration blocks, representing 146,000 square kilometers, located onshore and offshore, including 47 blocks in the mouth of the Amazon River alone, off the coast of the states of Amapa and Para. Shell, ExxonMobil, Total, and the Brazilian state-owned company Petrobras... some thirty companies have responded to the auction.

As COP30 in Belém (Amapa) approaches, environmentalists believe that Brazil's credibility on climate issues is seriously damaged. "Lula is banking on oil and gas expansion to stimulate economic growth ," analyzes Joachim Roth, member of the World Benchmarking Alliance . "This bet cannot pay off in a dangerously overheating world."

According to the ClimaInfo Institute , the exploitation potential of these 172 blocks – 24 billion barrels in total – is such that it would generate more than 11 billion tons of _CO2 into the atmosphere. This is more than what Brazilian agribusiness has emitted over the past six years.

"Brazil is missing a historic opportunity to play a leading role in decarbonization and protecting the planet ," says Suely Araujo, public policy coordinator at the Observatorio do Clima. "In the midst of a climate crisis, it is creating irreparable cracks."

President Lula's ambivalence on the climate is at issue and reflects broader contradictions that run through the Brazilian left. "The rainforests are pushed to the point of no return. The ocean is feverish. (…). Science proves that the cause of this disease is global warming and the use of fossil fuels," he hammered home in Nice in the run-up to the third United Nations Ocean Conference on June 9.

The former trade unionist rightly argues that it is up to rich countries, as the main culprits in the climate crisis, to settle their debt by financing the global energy transition, in particular, even though Brazil has been immersed in oil exploration for seventy years. It should be noted that through the nationalization of the oil sector, this policy had helped lift millions of Brazilians out of poverty.

Today, the sale of these new concessions is enough to make one pale in comparison, especially since the country joined OPEC in February; it is the leading oil producer in Latin America and is even the fourth largest exporter in the world.

"The use of oil is a dilemma that the whole world is facing, but it is unfair to blame only the countries of the South when Western countries have been benefiting from it for almost two hundred years," replied the Brazilian Minister of Science and Secretary General of the Communist Party (PCdoB), Luciana Santos , to L'Humanité .

Regarding the 47 blocks planned for the Brazilian equatorial margin, Lucia Ortiz, a member of Friends of the Earth Brazil, said that the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office has filed a lawsuit to prevent their sale, because it is being carried out "without adequate prior studies " and causes " a serious violation of fundamental rights, international commitments and Brazilian legislation."

Above all, she dismisses the argument of the economic opportunity that the country would benefit from: "mining or oil infrastructure for export and the free trade of raw materials benefit large companies, but not the region's population. " Already victims of deforestation, the indigenous peoples of the Amazon thus risk being sacrificed on the altar of profit.