Brazil welcomes China's oil investments

China is beginning to take a larger stake in Brazil's oil industry, a move that the South American nation welcomes, said Brazilian Ambassador to China Valdemar Carneiro Leao.

Leao made the remarks nearly three weeks after two Chinese State-owned oil giants, China National Offshore Oil Corp and China National Petroleum Corp, as part of a consortium comprising Royal Dutch Shell, France's Total SA and Brazil's state oil company Petrobras, were awarded a 35-year production sharing contract to develop Libra, a deepwater oilfield off the Rio coast estimated to hold up to 12 billion barrels of oil.

"We are very happy about the result because our embassy was involved in the process of encouraging Chinese companies to go to Brazil to take part in the bidding. I am happy that this really took place," he said.