Oil major Royal Dutch Shell Plc RDSA.L won half the blocks awarded in Brazil’s deepwater oil auction on Friday, while rival BP ( BP.L ) took two blocks and Exxon Mobil Corp ( XOM.N ) one in a historic opening of the pre-salt play to foreign operators. Brazil awarded six of the eight blocks on offer in the auction for the rights to pump oil from the country’s coveted pre-salt region, where billions of barrels of oil are trapped below thousands of feet of salt in the country’s Atlantic waters. President Michel Temer said development of the blocks would lead to 100 billion reais ($30.84 billion) in investment from the winning companies and 130 billion reais in royalties and other revenues for the cash-strapped state. The […]