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I don't think it's a gamble, it's a reality already. A lot of oil is already from those reserves, the investment slowed down due to scandal and oil prices, but

• marcosdumay 11y ago
  You see, things are not that simple. From the supply side, high extraction prices happen because the resource has a low energy return on energy invested. This means that when prices go up, it's economically interesting to buy products created with cheaper oil to sell more expensive oil. But once the price stay high for a while, extraction prices get up again. (It also means that it's double dumb to invest when prices are going down - one of the causes of Petrobras problems.) I don't have all the numbers, but from the little that I've got about "pré-sal", it's EROEI is bigger than 1. That means that, yes, at some price level it does become economically viable. It's just much higher than what you'll get calculating extraction prices today. At the demand side, lots and lots of people simply can not pay for expensive oil. That means that when oil get sustainably expensive, its consumption will be much smaller, and "pré-sal" will have to compete with much cheaper reserves for those consumers. Yes, eventually there'll come a time when cheaper oil is mostly gone, but we are not there yet.