Brazil’s pre-salt fields demonstrated how a major oil province can transform a country’s trade balance, tax revenue, investment capacity and even geopolitical influence. But success can also breed complacency. As existing fields continue to deliver rising volumes and strong returns, finding their successor can appear less urgent than it really is.
The pre-salt now accounts for 80% of Brazil’s oil and gas production. The Energy Research Office, or EPE, estimates that national oil output could reach 5.1 million barrels per day in 2032 before slipping to 4.9 million in 2035. The decline is still some distance away, but it is already visible on the horizon.
Exploration, however, takes time. Selecting a block, securing environmental permits, drilling a well, appraising a discovery and bringing a production system online can take 10 to 15 years. The oil Brazil may need in the 2040s must begin to be explored for today.
To the north, Guyana shows what can happen when an exploration frontier meets capital, technology and speed of execution. Within a few years, the country went from having virtually no commercial oil production to pumping about 900,000 barrels per day from the Stabroek block. Projects under development could raise capacity to roughly 1.7 million barrels per day by the end of the decade.
Brazil is watching that expansion from the other side of the geological frontier. After years of environmental licensing, Petrobras began drilling the Morpho well in deep waters off Amapá state to test the Foz do Amazonas Basin. It is a meaningful step, but still only one well along a vast and largely unexplored coastline. Petrobras plans to invest $2.5 billion and drill as many as 15 new wells across the Equatorial Margin by 2030.
Uruguay is also moving ahead to the south. Although the country has yet to make a commercial offshore discovery, it has awarded seven large exploration areas and attracted Shell, Chevron, APA, Eni, QatarEnergy and YPF. In 2026, Uruguay completed the first stage of a new 3D seismic campaign and is preparing to drill the OFF-6 block, with work expected to begin from September 2027.
Across the border lies Brazil’s Pelotas Basin. Petrobras acquired 29 blocks in the region, 26 of them in partnership with Shell. The basin offers scale, experienced operators and a geological analogue that has gained credibility following major discoveries off Namibia. Yet Pelotas remains essentially an option in the portfolio, awaiting data, permits and wells capable of determining whether its geological promise holds up.
Brazil’s neighbors are moving faster partly because they lack what Brazil already has. Guyana needed to turn a discovery into revenue. Uruguay must provide predictability to attract companies willing to assume exploration risk. Brazil, by contrast, still has the pre-salt — a proven, highly competitive province capable of absorbing tens of billions of dollars at lower geological risk.
The pre-salt has therefore become a trap of its own success. Only seven offshore exploration wells were drilled in Brazil in 2024, five of them once again in the pre-salt. For companies, investing where infrastructure, expertise and higher probabilities of success already exist is entirely rational. For the country, however, concentrating exploration on yesterday’s frontier risks leaving tomorrow’s project pipeline empty.
Environmental licensing is part of the problem, but it does not explain everything. New frontiers require rigorous standards, detailed knowledge of ecosystems and credible emergency-response capacity. The mistake is to turn every exploration well into an open-ended political battle without clear timelines or stable criteria.
Exploration does not amount to a commitment to produce every barrel that may be found. It means acquiring the information needed to make decisions based on known resources rather than assumptions.
From Oiapoque to Chuí, no one yet knows where commercially viable oil will be found. What is clear is that Guyana has already turned geology into production, while Uruguay is racing to assess its potential. Between them, Brazil has capital, technology, infrastructure and some of the South Atlantic’s most promising acreage.
The greatest risk is not exploring and finding nothing. It is waiting until the pre-salt is already in decline — and discovering that the scarcest asset was not oil, but time.
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