Activity in Brazil’s energy patch keeps ratcheting ever higher. During January 2020, Latin America’s largest economy saw its all-important petroleum industry achieve a new milestone pumping on average a record 3.168 million barrels of crude daily. The COVID-19 pandemic and March 2020 oil price collapse did little to slow the oil boom underway in Latin America’s largest economy. Brazil’s national oil company Petrobras, in March 2020, slashed planned annual spending by 29% and shuttered its shallow water platforms in response to the pandemic and oil price collapse. This did little to stymie production growth. Petrobras’s second quarter 2020 commercial oil output grew 4.1% year over year to almost 2.5 million barrels daily. That was driven primarily by the significant expansion of the national oil company’s presence in the pre-salt fields, where production expanded almost 31% to 1.5 million barrels daily. There are signs that even the ongoing impact of […]