Nelson Bastos wasn’t on the oil company’s programme. But he took the mic anyway.
After a lifetime of studying the play of wind and tide in a stretch of ocean known as the Foz do Amazonas — Portuguese for “Mouth of the Amazon” — the 58-year-old fisherman wasn’t buying the corporate line.
“The people who fish out there, in the Foz do Amazonas, know there’s a wind called the Geral,” Bastos told families and fishermen gathered on a humid morning last November at the hut housing the local fishing association. “When one of our buoys breaks loose up there in the north, the Geral wind brings the buoy to the shore. It could bring the oil here, in the event of a spill.”
Murmurs of agreement rippled through the crowd. “He’s speaking the truth,” nodded one woman to her neighbour.
Petrobras — Brazil’s national oil and gas company — had staged the November 24 meeting for residents of a small town called Cachoeira do Arari. It’s the only significant inland settlement accessible by paved road on Bastos’ native Marajó, a riverine island of dense forest and wetlands roughly the size of Denmark.
Petrobras employees, economist Bruna Simão, and oceanographer Nãnashaira Medeiros Siqueira had just given a presentation on the company’s plans to explore for oil in the Foz do Amazonas — part of a wider campaign to reassure coastal communities in northeastern Brazil that the industry will do them no harm.
By the time Bastos had shared his concerns that the project could disrupt traditional fishing practices and cause a potentially catastrophic oil spill, the audience’s whispers had turned into roars of support.
It was a rare win for local drilling opponents against Petrobras’ PR juggernaut.
From hiring Gen-Z influencers, film stars, and pop icons, to splashing its green, white, and yellow logo on projects to conserve mangroves and humpback whales, Petrobras has rapidly scaled up its PR activity since it began to acquire sole ownership rights to oil blocks in Foz do Amazonas in 2020, an investigation published today by DeSmog in partnership with Brazilian magazine piauí shows.
Corporate documents and data, obtained via freedom of information (FOI) requests and public transparency disclosures, combined with dozens of on-the-ground interviews, give the first comprehensive account of the company’s’ strategy to counter growing opposition from coastal communities and environmental advocates to its drilling plans.
Petrobras boosted spending on advertising and sponsorship five-fold between 2020 and 2025, the investigation found. Videos created by influencers on the company’s behalf racked up over 1.5 billion views in 2024 and 2025 — the equivalent to everyone in Brazil, a country of 213 million people, watching a Petrobras-sponsored video eight times.
A New Oil Frontier
Petrobas embarked on this wave of attention-grabbing content during a crucial period in its strategy to expand its fossil fuel portfolio.
For decades, the oil industry has eyed the Brazilian Equatorial Margin, a series of basins including Foz do Amazonas, as a major new frontier in its quest to open up the world’s remaining deepwater reserves. It’s an opportunity worth 30 billion barrels of oil and hundreds of billions of dollars — making it central to Brazil’s plans to turn itself from the world’s seventh to fourth-largest oil exporter.
“Let’s drill, baby, drill!” Petrobras CEO Magda Chambriard said of Foz do Amazonas at an oil and gas conference in Texas in May 2025.
True to Chambriard’s word, Petrobras began sinking an exploratory deepsea well five months later, in an area referred to as Block 59. The test site lies 175 kilometers (about 108 miles) off the coast of the Brazilian town of Oiapoque, on the border with French Guiana, and 500 kilometers (311 miles) from Marajó.
Successful tests could open the door to drilling at hundreds more prospective blocks that stretch southwards towards the island. Some are already owned by Petrobras, as well as other international oil companies such as ExxonMobil, which is pumping more than 900,000 barrels of oil a day from the seabed offshore of Brazil’s neighbour Guyana.
Campaigners, academics, and state prosecutors have accused Petrobras of misleading the public by playing down climate and environmental risks and obscuring the true scale of their plans from local communities. Petrobras, for its part, says its information campaign is designed to inform people about its plans and cover both “possible positive and negative” impacts in the region.
Bastos may have won the room in Cachoeira do Arari. Winning the PR war is a different matter.
Eyes on the Prize
Petrobras and its rivals drilled dozens of wells in the Foz do Amazonas in the 1980s and 1990s. But an usually high accident rate caused by strong currents, along with dozens of dry wells, prompted the industry to largely abandon the area.
Huge oil discoveries in Guyana’s waters in the 2010s prompted a reassessment by the Brazilian government, which began auctioning oil blocks in the region in 2013.
However, Brazil’s environmental regulator IBAMA repeatedly knocked back drilling applications, citing risks to marine ecosystems. The waters off Brazil are home to the world’s largest continuous stretch of mangroves — coastal marine trees that serve as nurseries for young fish and crustaceans, and that can absorb large amounts of planet-heating carbon dioxide. More than 100 prospective oil blocks overlap with the 9,300-square-kilometer (5,779-square-mile) Great Amazon Reef System, one of the largest coral and sponge reefs in the world.
When British oil major BP and its French rival TotalEnergies decided to cut their losses over 2020 and 2021, Petrobras acquired their blocks, in which it had previously been a minority partner. Initially, in 2023, IBAMA denied Petrobras an exploration license, citing inadequate oil spill response plans relative to the basin’s “extreme socio-environmental sensitivity.” When Petrobras tried again in 2024 with an updated plan, dozens of IBAMA staff signed a recommendation that the license be denied.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who sees the project as an unmissable economic opportunity for Brazil, publicly criticised IBAMA’s decisions.
IBAMA eventually accepted another update from Petrobras on the eve of the October 2025 United Nations climate conference, known as COP30, which Brazil hosted in the Amazon city of Belém. Climate advocates were dismayed, seeing the decision as at odds with Brazil’s responsibility, as chair of the talks, to push for agreements curbing the use of fossil fuels.
The tension around the permitting process has seen a “war of narratives” break out, according to Suely Araújo, who served as president of IBAMA from 2016 to 2018, when the regulator denied a drilling application by TotalEnergies. That decision had gone largely unnoticed, Araújo said. “It wasn’t even in the papers.”
Enlisting Influencers
Since 2020, Petrobras has built a formidable PR operation to present the company as key to a greener and more prosperous future, developing sophisticated strategies to target social media users alongside more traditional TV advertising and sponsorship campaigns.
Petrobras tripled the number of social media influencers it hired between 2022 and 2024 to 72, according to company data obtained via FOI requests and shared with DeSmog by Greenpeace’s investigative unit Unearthed.
Petrobras’ spending on TV slots, billboards, and targeted social media ads reached R$372 million ($74 million) in 2025, according to its public disclosures — more than five times the R$73 million ($14 million) it spent in 2020.
Advertising agencies including São Paulo-based Propeg and New York-based Ogilvy, which both have five-year contracts with Petrobras worth more than R$450 million ($87 million) according to the disclosures, played key roles in creating its ad campaigns. Ogilvy is owned by British advertising conglomerate WPP, which has a long history of working with the fossil fuel industry.
Propeg and Ogilvy said questions about Petrobras’ advertising strategy should be directed to Petrobras. WPP did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Petrobras has also quadrupled the number of cultural and environmental projects it sponsors since 2020, its public disclosures show. The value of these contracts has quintupled to R$1.25 billion ($240 million) from R$245.4 million ($47.4 million).
“Fossil fuel companies are very afraid of local communities protesting because they can make it difficult on the ground,” said Gertjan Plets, who researches oil and gas philanthropy at the Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “So they enter the local cultural sector, the local ecological preservation groups, to really make sure that they have the social license to operate.”
Responding to questions from DeSmog, Petrobras said there was no “causal relationship” between its ambitions to drill in the Foz do Amazonas basin and its increase in spending on advertising, sponsorship, and influencers. The company said its communications spending had been unusually low in 2020 as it sold assets to reduce its debts, and since 2023 has returned to “levels compatible with the scale, reach, and institutional responsibility of the largest company in Brazil.” Petrobras added that its inflation-adjusted advertising spend was 55 percent higher in 2012 than in 2025.
“I imagine myself participating in the great challenge that is [drilling in] the Equatorial Margin,” says a Petrobras employee in one of dozens of online videos, articles, and social media posts about the project that Petrobras produced during its five-year battle to win the licence. “I’m proud to be part of this team, you know?”
A Partial Picture
Under the terms of the exploration licence, IBAMA requires Petrobras to organise “informational meetings” like the November meeting in Cachoeira do Arari where Bastos spoke.
In practice, these events are also opportunities for the company to tell its side of the story to communities that it might not reach with its television or digital advertising. Most who attended in Cachoeira do Arari were hearing about Petrobras’ plans for the Foz do Amazonas for the first time.
Petrobras held 17 such meetings in November and December 2025, according to a letter the company sent to IBAMA, obtained via FOI.
During meetings on Marajó, the Petrobras representatives Simão and Siqueira listed 12 environmental projects the company is supporting in the area, said disruption to traditional fishing practices would be minimal, and promised that drilling would boost the local economy. Their presentations also included a slide displaying dozens of everyday objects, from footballs, to tyres, to artificial fish bait labelled “Produtos feitos com Petróleo” — “products made from oil.”
“Oil touches many parts of our daily lives,” Siqueira noted each time the slide appeared.
Neither the presenters nor their presentation referred to climate change beyond an unexplained reference on one slide to “the greenhouse effect.” Fossil fuels are the biggest drivers of global heating, and scientists have warned that there can be no new oil exploration if the world is to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Asked why presenters didn’t talk about climate change at informational meetings, including the proven link between burning oil and rising global temperatures, Petrobras did not respond, instead noting that the majority of Brazil’s domestic greenhouse gas emissions come from farming.
When asked why its licensing process did not require Petrobras to discuss climate change during these meetings, IBAMA told DeSmog it was “relevant” but that “the discussion of climate impacts falls outside the scope of an exploratory drilling project.”
Researchers have questioned the company’s assurances that the project poses little environmental risk. A sample of Petrobras’ Foz do Amazonas PR materials from 2022 to 2024, including community presentations, contained at least 10 false or misleading statements, according to a study published in the academic journal Global Environmental Change in March.
For example, explainer pages on Petrobras’ website state that Block 59 is not located “near rivers, lakes, floodplains or reef systems.” This contradicts IBAMA’s reasons for denying Petrobras a license in 2023, which highlighted risks to the Great Amazon Reef System and mangroves on the nearest coast.
Similarly, materials for an online course that Petrobras ran for local journalists in 2022 covered positive talking points about the project, but did not mention potential environmental or climate impacts, according to copies of the materials obtained via FOI.
Blogger Seles Nafes, who has 90,000 followers on Instagram and runs a news site covering Amapá, one of the two Brazilian states in the Foz do Amazonas basin, was one of 36 journalists or media groups invited to the event, according to the materials. Since it took place, he has published at least 10 articles highlighting the project’s potential economic benefits and attacking its detractors.
Petrobras declined to confirm Nafes’ attendence at the course, or say whether any of the other 35 invited journalists or media groups attended, on the grounds that this is personal information protected under Brazilian transparency law. Nafes did not respond to a request for comment.
Tide of Trouble
Perhaps the biggest concern of locals is the risk of an oil spill — a danger only likely to grow if the Foz do Amazonas evolves into a significant hub for offshore production.
Siqueira, the Petrobras oceanographer, told Marajó locals that Petrobras’ studies showed that even in the event of a spill at Block 59, oil would never reach the Brazilian coast. She added there was a “low probability” — around a 10 percent chance — of a spill reaching the Caribbean.
Expert witnesses for NGOs and Indigenous groups challenging the license in court dispute such assurances. They allege there are flaws in the oil spill modelling Petrobras submitted to IBAMA, including use of 2013 data on tides and currents, even though data from 2024 was available.
Responding to questions from DeSmog, Petrobras and IBAMA said this was “incorrect” and that the modelling followed “industry best practices.”
In the meetings on Marajó, Siqueria also showed a slide saying the company had drilled “over 3,000 deepwater wells without environmental damage.”
Petrobras, however, has a history of environmental and safety disasters, both on- and offshore. Petrobras pipelines twice burst in 2000, pouring millions of gallons of oil into Rio de Janeiro’s Guanabara Bay, and then later into the Iguazu river in southern Brazil. Explosions at offshore platforms in 2001 and 2015 killed 20 workers.
Petrobras also reports hundreds of smaller offshore environmental incidents every year to the National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels, such as drillingfluid discharges, according to data available on the agency’s website.
“In Marajó, some communities don’t have this information, it never arrives. Or when it does arrive, it arrives in a completely distorted form,” said Fernanda Pereira, a 23-year-old biology student, after attending a meeting in Soure, on the east coast of Marajó. Another attendee, part of the local Nem Um Poço a Mais (“Not One More Well”) campaign, described Petrobras’ presentation as “a wonderful PR performance.”
The company’s messaging has also roused the suspicions of some officials.
In February, state prosecutors in the Ministério Público Federal, Brazil’s public prosecutor, sent an official recommendation to IBAMA that Petrobras’ license be revoked on several grounds, including that the company was misleading the public in its community presentations and communications materials. Specifically, prosecutors argued Petrobras was downplaying the project’s potential impacts by only talking about its initial exploratory well — named “Morpho,” after an Amazonian butterfly — when its licensing application showed it actually planned to drill at least three other wells in Block 59 between 2027 and 2029.
DeSmog verified that the presentation given by Siqueira and Simão — obtained via FOI — and its own audio recording of a meeting in Soure, Marajó, included no mention of the other three wells.
Petrobras told DeSmog that it did disclose the three additional wells in the meetings, and maintained that it has an excellent safety record.
High Hopes
In a region that is perennially neglected by state and federal governments, some locals are in favour of the Petrobras project, hoping it will boost revenues needed to provide vital services. Biologist Jeronimo Dias dos Santos, a resident of Amapá’s capital Macapá, says exploration in Foz do Amazonas could grow the economy while protecting inland biodiversity: “We can increase revenues without cutting down a tree, without large areas of monoculture, without deforestation.”
Research shows that historically, oil royalties have failed to consistently raise living standards across Brazil. In some cases they have increased inequality due to corruption and financial mismanagement.
Nevertheless, local campaigners fear that Petrobras’ PR tactics are working. In April 2024, the company told Indigenous leaders from Oiapoque, the town closest to Block 59, that the drilling could create up to 3.3 million jobs, R$46 billion in additional tax revenue, and add up to R$778 billion to GDP in surrounding states (respectively $9.04 billion and $152.82 billion), according to a presentation obtained via FOI and published in the Global Environmental Change study. “There’s this idea that Oiapoque could be the new Dubai,” said Luene Karipuna, an environmental and Indigenous rights campaigner from Oiapoque. “The disinformation process is gigantic.”
João Zanella, executive director at NAV Ocean, a marine environmental consultancy helping Petrobras run its information sessions, expects suspicions to fade.
“When something this big arrives, it always brings expectations about what it’s going to mean for fishermen’s livelihoods,” said Zanella, after a meeting in Salvaterra, a village on Marajó’s east coast. “But any decline in fishing isn’t going to come from this project. It’ll come from the other industrial pressures that have been building up around them. Over time, people begin to understand that. Their relationship with the company improves.”
When approached for comment after the same meeting, Simão and Siqueira, the two Petrobras representatives, said they were not allowed to speak to reporters.
Actors, Influencers, and Pop Stars
In a rising wide-angle shot, Camila Pitanga, one of Brazil’s most famous film stars, strides towards the camera in a green shirt. “Petrobras is a leader in the just energy transition,” she says. Next, Pitanga meets smiling employees and watches a presentation on a Petrobras-sponsored humpback whale conservation project. “You have to always be mindful of the environment,” Pitanga whispers from her auditorium seat.
Pitanga fronts Petrobras’ “Transição Energética Justa” (“Fair Energy Transition”) campaign, launched in July 2025. It first aired during Brazil’s flagship TV news programme Jornal Nacional, and included an original song by Diogo Nogueira, one of Brazil’s biggest pop stars.
Critics say the campaign doesn’t reflect — or distracts from — the reality of Petrobras’ approach to the climate crisis.
Petrobras’ planned spending on exploring for and producing oil between now and 2030 rose to 72 percent of its total investments last year, according to its latest five-year plan — a 2.2 percent rise on its 2024 projections. Meanwhile, the company’s “low carbon energy” spending dropped nearly a fifth, from 9.7 to 8 percent — a figure that also includes “natural” or methane gas, a planet-warming fossil fuel.
If all of the fossil fuel resources that Petrobras currently has under development or consideration were burned in the future, global heating would surge past the 1.5 degrees Centigrade (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) cap that nations agreed to in 2015’s Paris climate pact, according to research by German environmental NGO Urgewald.
Petrobras has not just enlisted TV, film, and pop stars to present it in a favourable light. Petrobras has also built a network of social media influencers — from biologists, to models, to LGBTQ+ activists — that targets younger, socially engaged audiences.
Some content, such as a series of videos by Gen-Z science influencer Mylly Biologando about algae fuels, presents the company as a clean energy innovator. Other posts associate the Petrobras brand with socially progressive, Indigenous, or environmental movements.
We’e’ena Tikuna, an Indigenous artist and activist from the Amazonian Tikuna people, designed and shared a Tikuna version of the orange Petrobras workers’ jacket with her one million Instagram followers for its “Petrohype” campaign in 2023.
“People connect with people,” said Bruno Araujo, a Brazilian geographer and climate influencer. “Influencers can generate a real connection with their audience, which gives the corporate messages they are selling legitimacy.”
Often, Petrobras uses influencer content to promote its sponsorship portfolio, including in the Foz do Amazonas region.
In one video from the “Mochileiras” series, viewed over five million times on YouTube, culture influencer Amanda Mota smiles and interviews musicians in front of Petrobras logos at the 2025 Choro Jazz festival on Marajó.
Collectively, Petrobras influencers posted over 5,000 times in the year and a half before the Block 59 license was granted, internal data obtained via FOI shows. These posts landed on social media users’ newsfeeds over four billion times.
We’e’ena Tikuna requested not to be named in this story, and threatened legal action otherwise. Amanda Mota did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Biologando has previously stated that her team “carefully evaluate[s] the companies we choose to associate with… [and] …believe in Petrobras’ efforts to prepare for the energy transition.”
The Leak
It’s 10:00 am on Bernarda beach, on the east coast of Marajó. The sandy bay is lined with thick, green mangroves.
A group of 15 men stand knee-deep in the water around a wooden boat, sorting fish from a blue net. The hum of their chatter is broken only by an occasional burst of communal laughter. Every few seconds, a fish slaps into a plastic crate on the sand, lobbed from the water with an accuracy honed over many mornings of practice. Black vultures wait for the discards.
Nelson Bastos, who learnt to fish here with his father when he was 13 years old, is watching. “This is what we’re afraid of losing,” he says.
IBAMA’s decision to let Petrobras run its tests at Block 59 has put the Foz do Amazonas project in motion for now, but it is not yet a done deal. If enough oil reserves are found, full-scale production likely won’t be possible for another seven to eight years.
Campaigners say they won’t give up trying to stop the drilling. They continue to attend anti-oil meetups, post on social media, and organise protests.
Others are wearied by the efforts of challenging a company with seemingly infinite resources to tell its own version of the Foz do Amazonas story. Some have resigned themselves to attending Petrobras presentations to find out if they will be compensated if something goes wrong.
Just over a month after the Cachoeira do Arari meeting in November, an accident underscored the risks associated with deep-sea drilling. On 4 January, 2026, 18,000 litres of drilling fluid — a mixture of water and various chemicals that is used to maintain pressure in an oil well — leaked from Block 59’s “Morpho” well into the ocean.
Petrobras claimed to have controlled the leak, and said that the fluid met “permitted toxicity limits.” IBAMA nonetheless fined Petrobras R$2.5 million ($480,000) and ordered the company to pause drilling for one month.
The devastating oil spill that Bastos and others fear may not yet have arrived. But those opposing the project say the leak proves what they’ve been saying for years — that Petrobras’ assurances can’t be trusted.
Additional reporting by Naira Hofmeister.
