Eike Batista Forecasts 5-6 Million Barrels of Oil Per Day for Brazil by 2020

OGX Petroleo & Gas Participacoes SA rose to a two-week high in Sao Paulo trading after the oil company controlled by Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista said a well may hold as many as 900 million barrels of recoverable oil. The OGX oil is in shallow offshore oil on the continental shelf off of Brazil. The lifting cost of the OGX oil is $8 per barrel.

Eike Batista predicted in an interview on the Charlie Rose show that Brazil would have oil production of 5-6 million barrels by 2020.

Brazilian oil and gas start-up company OGX Petroleo e Gas Participacoes (OGXP3.SA) expects its output to reach 1.4 million barrels per day in 2019, it said in a securities filing late Tuesday. If the targets are met, Batista could have a net worth of $100 billion by 2020, which would make him one of the richest men in the world at that time.

The company, owned by Brazilian billionaire Eike Batista, said it would bring forward the beginning of its production to early next year from late 2011, and that it has set a target of reaching a production of 730,000 bpd in 2015.

The expected volume of 500 million to 900 million barrels at the company’s OGX-3 well in the BM-C-41 block in Brazil’s Campos Basin is larger than an estimate of 416 million barrels from a DeGoyler & MacNaughton report, Banco BTG Pactual analyst Gustavo Gattass wrote in a note.

OGX, which has potential resources of 6.7 billion barrels, tripled in Sao Paulo trading last year as it struck oil in several of its wells. The company said it has about $4 billion for investments in exploration, production and new businesses.

Batista also predicted that Brazil should be the fifth largest economy in the world by 2015-2020. This would be behind Germany, Japan, China and the USA.

Similar to China, Brazil’s government has been taking steps to prevent or delay currency appreciation.

Brazil may have difficulty stemming the real’s appreciation through 2011, said Mauro Leos, a credit officer for Latin America at Moody’s Investors Service.

“It will be very difficult for authorities to contain the pressure,” Leos said in an interview in Sao Paulo. “There will be implications on foreign exchange in 2010, possibly 2011.”

The tax measure is unlikely to succeed in stemming the currency’s world-beating rally, Paulo Vieira da Cunha, a former central banker, said.

“It’s a desperate move,” said Cunha, director for international affairs at Brazil’s central bank from April 2006 to January 2008 and now a partner at asset management firm Tandem Global Partners LLC in New York. “This kind of measure does not alter the exchange rate trend” because investors will figure out ways to bypass the tax, he said.

Barclays Plc reiterated its forecast for the real to rise to 1.65 per dollar by the end of the year.