Brazil in the Spotlight

How data transparency, strict regulation, prudent design, and careful operation of oil and gas assets can minimize energy waste and increase security.

When you think of Rio De Janeiro, you likely picture the spectacle of Carnival, beautiful beaches, and famous landmarks nestled between mountains. Very few would picture this famous Brazilian state as the world’s tenth biggest oil producer.

Just offshore, there are two basins that make up 80 percent of oil production in Brazil: Campos and Santos, producing over 3 million barrels of oil per day. When it comes to gas, it’s a different story: Brazil supplies less than one percent globally. As such, Brazil relies on natural gas (and diesel) imports for a small share of its energy needs.

Brazil’s oil and gas production is overseen by the state-owned company, Petrobras, and increasingly regulated by the National Agency for Petroleum (ANP). While Brazil’s recent decision to expand oil and gas production poses risks and has drawn scrutiny, the country’s exceptional data transparency — with details about production practices, field locations, and market activity —  provides a template that other countries could implement using actual, open inputs that can be verified.

With deep industry intelligence amid shifts in domestic and international markets, Brazil’s leadership is well positioned to take steps to balance its energy and environmental goals with affordability and labor benefits. If carefully executed, Brazil could showcase how other oil-dominated nations can cut energy waste and safeguard the climate.

Global spotlight on Brazil

As host of the 2025 UN climate conference (COP30), Brazil finds itself at the center of a complex energy transition story. Over the past decade, Brazil’s oil and gas industry has surged, with technological developments unlocking new reserves. Since 2015, total oil production has increased 40 percent, and gas production has increased nearly 80 percent (albeit over a small base), as plotted below.

Amid this expansion, the national oil company, Petrobras, has reaffirmed its net-zero objectives across its direct (Scope 1) and indirect (Scope 2) emissions and set intermediary targets for 2030. The company reports a 40 percent reduction in its absolute operational emissions and a 70 percent reduction in methane emissions since 2015.

While we find that Brazil has one of the lowest oil and gas methane emissions intensities compared to other nations, with production on the rise since 2020, it is estimated that absolute CO₂ and methane emissions from production are increasing. To meet its climate ambitions, the industry will need to further reduce emissions intensities and improve methane monitoring to ensure all sources are mitigated and accounted for.

Amid progress, there are warning signs

Fortunately, Brazil boasts a wealth of energy resources beyond fossil fuels. The country’s renewable energy sources, for example, have been rapidly eclipsing oil and gas for domestic electricity, as plotted below. Continuing to prioritize and develop non-fossil resources is the key to Brazil’s successful transition to a secure, clean, and prosperous energy future.

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration, September 26, 2025, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=66184

Despite its energy endowments beyond oil and gas, Petrobras recently received approval from the government regulator (the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, IBAMA) to drill 175 kilometers off the coast of the ecologically sensitive mouth of the Amazon. Environmental groups have pledged to appeal, citing the Amazon’s importance to the climate and biodiversity. Equally as important, governance in this region is not well established institutionally to safeguard these new offshore operations. Opposition to Petrobras’s plans is building among Brazilians, and their position highlights outsized risks from oil and gas production and shipping, especially compared to Brazil’s safer energy alternatives.

These are warning signs. Beyond routine impacts due to business-as-usual operations, upsets can be devastating in fragile ecosystems. And developing resources in previously undeveloped areas can create new challenges, especially for nearby communities. While environmental risks are a key factor, social impacts are equally significant, with risks stemming from indirect impacts such as population influx, security challenges, and pressure on public services in the region.

Unprecedented data transparency

Brazil showcases its oil and gas operational data in ways that most other countries do not — with unprecedented transparency. ANP makes public Brazil’s oil and gas activity, which is needed for RMI to independently estimate the nation’s oil and gas emissions intensities.

Using ANP’s publicly reported data, OCI+  finds ranges in production emissions intensities among Brazil’s oil and gas assets, plotted below. Offshore oil platforms have estimated emissions intensities are around 70 kilograms carbon dioxide equivalent per barrel (kg CO₂e/boe). Onshore oil and gas assets, on the other hand, have much higher average and wide-ranging production emissions intensities, from 80 to well over 250 kgCO₂e/boe.

The diversity of Brazil’s oil and gas portfolio highlights the opportunity to target reductions where they matter most.

Offshore, Brazil’s twenty-two oil fields currently re-inject “native” CO₂ back into their reservoirs. Native CO₂ is naturally present in the geologic formation and produced as associated gas alongside oil and is commonly vented, resulting in high emission intensity production. Many operators worldwide vent their CO₂, which drives oil and gas emissions up. Brazil does not. In 2024, for example, Brazil prevented some 15 million tons of CO₂ emissions.

Onshore, however, higher emission intensities for onshore fields are driven by high water-to-oil ratios, with energy-intensive pumping, treatment, and injection required to produce these fields. Additionally, production is lower through each well, lending itself to higher fugitive methane emissions intensity. Even with these higher emission intensities, offshore production volumes are fifteen times that of onshore production, so total emissions are higher for offshore fields versus onshore fields. With asset level data from ANP, emissions can be better pinpointed and remediated.

Managing Brazil’s methane

While Brazil’s oil consumption is in line with domestic production, this is not the case for gas: demand greatly outstrips supply, and consumption is slowly rising at five percent over the past five years. Even though Brazil’s oil and gas makes up a relatively small portion of power generation, industry (particularly chemical industry) is driving the gas market. These trends are refocusing Brazil’s attention on methane waste.

Flared Gas

One opportunity to reduce waste is to capture and reroute gas from flares to the market. Flaring, the purposeful burning of excess gas, poses a challenge to emissions reductions worldwide. The World Bank reports that Brazil currently has lower-than-average flared gas volumes. For example, reported flaring volume has nearly halved over a ten-year period while oil production increased 50 percent. Petrobras claims to have no routine flaring. Success has been attributed to regulatory oversight in Brazil, where licensees are required to submit monthly reports to the national regulator detailing flared and vented volumes, which are monitored daily. Still, flares combust gas into CO₂ and can release unburned methane from inefficient flares.

Vented Gas

Super emission events, including venting (the purposeful release of gas) and non-routine flares (such as during maintenance), often produce more emissions during oil and gas production than routine flaring. The global effort to monitor super emission events is quickly growing with satellites and flyovers. Measurement of these emissions in Brazil is hindered by technological limitations in monitoring offshore emissions, but new methods may reveal exact sources and quantities of methane emissions. The IEA estimates that Brazil made up just over two percent of global venting from oil and gas production in 2023, while making up less than two percent of global hydrocarbon production in barrels of oil equivalent.

Future Plans

Brazil is using the best available technology to reduce methane waste. For example, operators use hydrocarbon blanketing with inert gas seals on storage tanks. Vapor recovery units, such as those on the Floating Production, Storage, and Offloading (FPSO) facility, Anna Nery, capture gases that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere or flared.

FPSOs P-84 and P-85 envision an all-electric design that centralizes power generation to optimize fuel use and minimize fugitives, venting, and flaring. And combined cycle systems that recover waste heat to generate additional power, thereby lowering fuel gas consumption, will be implemented on FPSOs Maria Quitéria and Bacalhau. While there is still room for increased uptake of emissions reductions among Brazil’s producers, its push to reduce flaring and overall methane emissions could prove a model for other producing countries, especially those that already produce oil and rely on natural gas imports, and, like Brazil, wish to reduce waste gas and maximize resource value.

Looking ahead to deeper decarbonization in Brazil

To further support decarbonization, Petrobras has established a Decarbonization Fund under its Carbon Neutral Program, allocating USD $1.3 billion (2025–2029) to accelerate reductions in emissions. These funds are needed to further reduce the emissions intensities of Brazil’s oil assets given rising production volumes. Moreover, if Brazil ventures into new gas assets, keeping methane intensity below the 0.2% agreed to at COP28 will be necessary.

As such, utilizing this fund to institute methane detection and quantification projects could help address critical measurement gaps across the industry. While such technologies suit onshore operations, offshore environments present unique challenges due to limited space and mounting options for equipment deployment, high humidity and strong winds, and water surfaces that interfere with optical gas imaging (OGI) cameras. Investing in measurement — and making this data publicly available — would strengthen transparency, advance scientific understanding, and help differentiate asset types based on emissions performance.

Brazil’s oil and gas regulator, ANP, will continue to play a pivotal role in advancing transparency. ANP maintains a comprehensive repository of publicly accessible data, including detailed records on hydrocarbon production and flaring activities. This openness serves as a model for other producing nations seeking to enhance accountability and data-driven governance. Expanding emissions reporting requirements, particularly for methane as Brazil’s gas production rises, would further improve the precision and public availability of offshore methane estimates, addressing one of the most significant data gaps currently limiting comprehensive climate assessments.

Brazil’s energy story underscores the tension between fossil fuel dependence (especially for generating income from exports) and climate ambition. Continued progress in reducing flaring, cutting methane, and improving transparency offers promise. Yet deeper structural shifts remain essential. Achieving a truly sustainable energy future will require moving beyond incremental improvements in oil and gas. And with fragile environmental and social ecosystems, Brazil must remain vigilant that no matter how well it operates its oil and gas production, real risks exist from insufficient oversight and accidents. In the meantime, Brazil’s efforts to build a more transparent, lower-methane oil and gas sector can help bridge the transition to a cleaner, more resilient future.

RMI would like to acknowledge the valuable role Climate TRACE has played in our ability to analyze Brazil’s and other global oil and gas assets. See ClimateTRACE.org for global emissions inventories and other sectoral resources.