Brazil achieves Petroleum self-sufficiency.

[NNadir]

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, dressed in an orange jump suit, drenched his hand in oil as he flipped the switch Friday on a new oil rig that will usher in overall independence from foreign oil.

The start of production at the P-50 rig off Brazil's south Atlantic coast puts Brazil on track to produce as much oil as it consumes.

Silva showed off his oily hand to a crowd on the rig, a gesture imitating President Getulio Vargas when he created the government-run oil company Petroleo Brasileiro SA, or Petrobras, in the early 1950s...

...Brazil still depends on natural gas imported from Bolivia, on its own nuclear power and on hydroelectric dams to produce electricity, and on an abundance of ethanol, an alternative fuel made from Brazilian sugar cane.

Brazil produced only 2,700 barrels of oil a day when Petrobras was founded in 1953, and consumed 137,000 barrels a day. With the slogan "The oil is ours," the company set out to find oil in a country larger than the lower 48 U.S. states.

In 1968, the company began searching offshore in the Campos Basin near Macae, 110 miles east of Rio de Janeiro. The big break came six years later, with the discovery of the Garoupa field.

New discoveries followed, and Macae became an oil boomtown as the Campos Basin grew to become Brazil's top oil producer. Today, more than 80 percent of Brazil's oil comes from offshore fields.

Petrobras also became a world leader in deep-water drilling, developing state-of-the-art equipment and setting world records for deep-water drilling. It is Brazil's biggest and the 14th-largest oil company in the world, with operations in 15 countries...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060421/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/brazil_oil_sufficiency

Whether Brazil - a renewable powerhouse - is also a carbon dioxide neutral country, depends on how you view their disasterous stewardship of the Amazon rain forest.