Oil major Royal Dutch Shell Plc won half the blocks awarded in Brazil’s deepwater oil auction on Friday, while rival BP took two blocks and Exxon Mobil Corp took 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. The wins will bolster Shell’s position as the largest foreign operator in Brazil’s offshore oil sector, second only to state-run oil giant Petroleo Brasileiro (Petrobras). The Anglo-Dutch oil major won one area in consortium with France’s Total SA, another with Petrobras and Repsol-Sinopec, and a third with […]