SAO PAULO (AP) Brazil's National Petroleum Agency says large reserves of oil are located off the coast of the northeastern state of Sergipe, representing a new frontier in petroleum development in Latin America's biggest country.
Agency director Magda Chambriard said Wednesday that numbers on how much oil is in the reserves would not be announced before 2016.
Most of the country's oil production is concentrated in southeastern Brazil, where over the past several years billions of barrels of oil have been discovered in offshore reserves, mostly in deep, pre-salt fields.
On Monday, a consortium including Shell, Total, two Chinese firms and Brazil's state-run petroleum company Petrobras won the right to develop a field off the cost of Rio de Janeiro that could hold up to 12 billion barrels of oil.