Brazil will auction eight blocks in its coveted deepwater oil region on Friday, a prospect that has lured top executives from the world’s biggest oil companies to Rio de Janeiro for the bidding round. The oil firms and Brazilian officials expect to see aggressive bidding for the more than 12 billion barrels of estimated oil reserves on offer. “It’s going to be competitive,” Bernard Looney, chief executive for upstream at oil major BP ( BP.L ), told Reuters on the sidelines of an industry conference in Rio this week. The blocks are in a region with prolific oil production from fields known as pre-salt, where crude and gas sit beneath thousands of feet of salt under the deep Atlantic waters off eastern Brazilian shores. President Michel Temer’s government has enacted reforms to make the energy sector more attractive to oil majors, and for the […]