Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras), Brazil's state-controlled oil company, plans to increase borrowings and increase bond to fund the development of the Western Hemisphere's biggest petroleum discovery since 1976. “We want to become a more frequent issuer'' over the next four years, Chief Financial Officer Almir Barbassa said in an interview. Barbassa spent three months courting investors from Boston to Bahrain as the company prepared to sell $3.6 billion in bonds this year. Petrobras issued less than $800 million, on average, from 2001 through 2007. It plans to increase borrowings by $11 billion this year, excluding redemptions, to develop deposits that may make Brazil the world's seventh-largest oil exporter. The company, which added a net $600 million of debt in 2007, needs to buy platforms and deep-sea drilling equipment, rent rigs that can cost $600,000 a day and improve engineering to extract crude that's 6 miles below the ocean's surface. The Tupi field, announced in November, may hold 8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, while the Carioca deposit could contain 33 billion barrels, a government official said. The company will need to borrow more than $4 billion a year through 2012, based on its spending needs and cash flow, said Nelson Rodrigues de Matos, an analyst who tracks the Brazilian energy industry at Banco do Brasil SA in Rio de Janeiro. Petrobras's 7.75 percent bonds due 2014 yielded 5.38 percent today, up 0.11 percentage point, compared with 5.08 percent for comparable maturity Brazilian government debt. The senior unsubordinated securities, rated Baa1 by Moody's Investors Service, yield about 2.05 percentage points more than Treasuries, compared with a low of 1.1 points in April 2007. Royal Dutch Shell Plc's 4.625 percent notes maturing in 2017, rated Aa1 by Moody's, yielded 4.86 percent. Tupi is the largest oil discovery in the Western Hemisphere since Mexico's Cantarell three decades ago. Petrobras said it will take at least three months of drilling to evaluate Carioca. If the estimate of 33 billion barrels proves accurate the field would be the world's third-largest, after Ghawar in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait's Burgan. The discoveries may allow Petrobras to pay lower yields than bigger rivals, such as BP Plc and Petroleos Mexicanos, said Stefano Costagli, a fund manager at San Miniato, Italy-based Vegagest SGR SpA, which has $3.9 billion in investments. Tupi's oil could be worth more than $900 billion at current prices. Petrobras, which had $21.9 billion in debt at the end of 2007, canceled a $500 million bond sale in February as the credit-market slump caused demand for corporate debt to evaporate. Emerging-market energy companies pay 3.3 percentage points more in yield than benchmark rates.
