Exploration & Development:
Texas Geoscience Training Helps Cultivate Brazilian Expertise, Energy Independence
October 25, 2007
When Brazil achieved energy independence in April 2006, analysts credited the country’s abundance of petroleum resources, deregulation of the national oil industry, and a forward-thinking approach to sugar cane ethanol.
One contributing factor was largely overlooked, but not by the country’s geoscientists: The University of Texas at Austin.
From 1968-2003, The University of Texas at Austin educated 58 geoscientists and worked on collaborative projects with dozens more from Petrobras, Brazil’s national oil company. The amazing run, which is starting up again today (see sidebar, “Petrobras and UT Austin Renew Partnership”), included 14 master’s degree graduates, 12 Ph.D.s., and scores of professionals in short-term programs—the largest contribution of any foreign university to Brazil’s bumper crop of geologists, who surely deserve as much credit as sugar cane for Brazil’s emergence as a self-sufficient energy producer.
Today, Brazil relies on oil and gas for about 48 percent of its energy consumption. With proven reserves estimated at 11.2 billion barrels of oil equivalent in 2005 (according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration), Brazil ranks 16th for national oil reserves, between Algeria and Kazakhstan, up from 25th in 1982.
In 2006, the milestone that caught the world’s attention was Brazil’s transition from net importer to net exporter of overall energy resources. Ethanol played a major role in the shift. Mandatory as an option in the country’s flex-fuel cars, it has replaced about 40 percent of Brazil’s gasoline consumption, according to Cambridge Energy Research Associates, freeing up more hydrocarbons for export.
But Brazil’s energy equilibrium also resulted from explosive growth in petroleum exploration and production, particularly the development of heavy oil from deep and ultra-deep waters. These successes relied on strategic investments in education made decades earlier. To hear Brazil’s leading geoscientists tell the story, The University of Texas at Austin was pivotal in spurring the growth.
Like many of his colleagues, Guilherme de Oliveira Estrella, managing director for exploration and production at Petrobras, does not just credit the University but singles out one of its leaders in particular: “Bill Fisher represents a turning point in the exploration history of Petrobras,” said Estrella.
In the Beginning
How could one university—even one as substantial as The University of Texas at Austin—and more specifically one academic leader sway a national industry in the world’s fifth largest country?
The story begins in 1968, when Petrobras sent Raul Mosmann to The University of Texas at Austin, allotting him nine months to complete a master’s degree in geology. Years later Mosmann would become director of exploration and production at Petrobras. Today he is the regulatory affairs and geology manager for Exxon-Mobil-Brazil. In 1968 he was one of the first young geologists Petrobras sent abroad for a degree.
Mosmann came to Austin to work with Bob Folk on sedimentary petrology, but he was interested in the new discipline of depositional systems that Fisher and Frank Brown were teaching. “It was highly recommended—many wanted to attend because it was a new idea in stratigraphy,” said Mosmann. When he reeled out of the first class to confer with two fellow Latin American students, they were in shock from the pace of the science—and their inability to understand Fisher’s English. “The three of us were saying we didn’t understand anything this professor said,” recalled Mosmann.
Despite the language barrier, Mosmann persisted. When he returned to Brazil, he told his supervisor, the famed Carlos Walter Marinho Campos, director of Petrobras’ new exploration and production unit, that he took an interesting course in depositional systems from one of the professors. He thought Petrobras should expose its people to this professor’s ideas.
“What’s his name?” Carlos Walter asked. “Bill Fisher,” Mosmann replied. And then, in a statement that Mosmann said became famous at Petrobras, he told Carlos Walter, “There is a problem—to understand what he’s saying.”
Carlos Walter brought Fisher down for a course, which started a relationship led by Fisher on one side of the equator, Carlos Walter on the other. By the early 1970s, Fisher was regularly traveling to Brazil lecturing, and Petrobras sent two geoscientists to Austin to work on stratigraphy. Several projects ensued with help from Fisher and the Bureau of Economic Geology. Carlos Walter liked the results. After sending a few geologists, he began to send geophysicists, first for master’s degrees, and later Ph.D.s.
At a critical early juncture, Carlos Walter tried to get Petrobras to allow longer study times for students, enough to complete their degrees, which could not be accomplished in nine months. There was internal division at Petrobras, and Carlos Walter decided to take the matter to the board. He asked Fisher for data showing how many graduate geoscientists other oil companies had.
“Fisher sent data,” said Mosmann, “and then Carlos Walter said, ‘Okay, two days from now there’s a board meeting and I want you there to support me.’” Fisher came down on two days’ notice and helped Carlos Walter get approval of a major program in training.
“It changed the pattern of training. It was a turning point in Petrobras,” said Mosmann. “After that, Petrobras started to develop its own expertise.”
Teacher Appreciation
Petrobras’ expertise was very much in evidence July 9-11, 2006, in Rio de Janeiro, when dozens of representatives of Brazil’s energy sector—geoscientists, regulators, and business leaders— joined leaders from13 other countries attending the Jackson School’s second Latin American Forum on Energy and the Environment. In presentation after presentation, managers from the array of companies working in Brazil’s now-deregulated energy sector started their presentations with compliments to Fisher and former mentors from The University of Texas at Austin.
Wagner Peres, exploration manager for the Southern Atlantic Team of Devon Energy Corporation, complemented Fisher for having “a major effect on our professional careers at Petrobras. I’m very clear that the development in the field of seismic stratigraphy in Brazil was sponsored mainly by Dr. Bill Fisher and Frank Brown,” said Peres.
“In 30 years that I’ve been working, I never worked so hard as those years at UT, but I don’t regret it at all,” said Jorge Camargo, president of Statoil Brazil and a former member of the Petrobras board. “People like Bill Fisher, Milo Backus, Frank Brown, Clark Wilson, Paul Stoffa, many others played a very important part in the professional and academic development for many geoscientists from Brazil and Petrobras,” said Camargo.
“We went to the University of Texas not only to try to take the master’s and Ph.D. degrees but also to do common projects, exploratory projects in the continental margin of Brazil with the supervision of Bill Fisher,” said Petrobras’ Estrella. “But Bill Fisher did not teach us only technical points. Bill Fisher taught us to be intellectually honest. To face challenges. To be creative and to be very honest in our professional proposals in terms of exploration and production.”
As the University’s relationship with Petrobras deepened in the 1970s, a range of professors and researchers developed working ties with Brazilian counterparts. Many traveled to Brazil, “guys in geophysics, Milo Backus gave a lot of support to Petrobras, later on Paul Stoffa,” noted Mosmann. “Bob Folk was important, he taught me sedimentary petrology,” Mosmann said, then added with a smile, “but he doesn’t like oil.”
Critical Support
Throughout the relationship, Fisher and his wife Marilee cultivated a supportive environment in Austin that was instrumental for many of the visiting Brazilians. “Many of us were bringing families and having to study hard,” said Mosmann. “Bill and Marilee were very helpful to foreign students, always with a lot of support for people, not only as students but as people.”
Alumni recalled Marilee seeking out Portugese-speaking doctors, dentists, and babysitters, and helping new arrivals feel at ease in Austin’s new culture.
Victor Dauzacker benefited greatly from the Fishers’ support. Through five years pursuing his Ph.D., Dauzacker found himself in occasional clashes with a member of his dissertation committee.
“He suffered a lot,” recalled Mosmann. Fisher, his dissertation supervisor, encouraged him and helped him persist, ultimately recommending “Basin Analyses of Evaporitic and Post-evaporitic Depositional Systems, Espirito Santo Basin, Brazil, South America” for the university’s best dissertation award in 1981.
Dauzacker went on to Australia, where he was the first person to suggest the turbidite model in the Otway Basin. Ironically, said Mosmann, “he worked with the guy he’d been fighting with at Texas—and they made a lot of money together.”
By the 1980s, students like Dauzacker were riding the crest of a wave of collaboration with The University of Texas at Austin. The wave was about to crash, with the number of scientists enrolled peaking at eight in 1982 and dropping to an average of about one per year in the intervening decades.
Francisco Nepomuceno, executive manger of exploration and production for Petrobras, makes a compelling case for the value of the historical relationship—and how useful its renewal could be as Brazil moves into yet another phase in its search for hydrocarbons. In a series of slides shown at the first Latin American Forum in Austin, in September 2005, Nepomuceno tracked the close correlation between the number of Petrobras students working at The University of Texas at Austin and the number of wells the company drilled. Both numbers peaked in 1982 (when Petobras drilled 353 onshore, shallow water, and deep water wells). The expansion of Brazil’s proved oil reserves followed the same general slope, but with about 20 years’ lag behind education and exploration.
Nepomuceno’s conclusion? Investing in education and research programs at The University of Texas at Austin was a brilliant longterm move for Petrobras and Brazil.
Deep Future
Working in today’s de-regulated Brazilian energy sector, with revitalized competition and high prices, Petrobras is in a very different position than the mid- to late-1980s, when reserves were expanding and prices were dropping.
With strong production in place for its national needs, Brazil faces the combined geological and engineering problems of developing its abundant heavy oil resources. Much of the heavy oil resides in Campos and Espirito Santo basins, where Brazil expects to see significant production capacity added by 2008. Led by Petrobras, which still maintains by far the dominant stake in the country’s hydrocarbon sector, Brazil anticipates major investments in exploration nationally. Petrobras alone plans to spend $34.1 billion on worldwide E&P from 2006-2010, $28 billion of that being designated for Brazil, as reported by Veronica Murillo in Rigzone.
“Oil prices are high, and the cost of finding oil has increased enormously,” José Jorge de Moraes, general manager of E&P Brazil new ventures for Petrobras, told the Latin American Forum attendees in Rio. “Ultra deepwater is our present reality. We have enormous technological challenges to solve if we want to have success from now on.”
To rise to those challenges, said Moraes, academia and industry have to join efforts, combining the best of human skills with the best of technology while balancing environmental concerns.
With one of the strongest sedimentology/stratigraphy programs in the world, an expanding focus on the nexus between energy and the environment, and a tradition of educating Brazil’s best and brightest geoscientists, the Jackson School and The University of Texas Austin are poised to help propel the next expansion.
by J.B. Bird
For more information about the Jackson School contact J.B. Bird at jbird@jsg.utexas.edu,
512-232-9623.
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