Brazil's Oleo e Gas Restarts Oil Field

Brazil's Óleo e Gás Participações SA, which has been under bankruptcy protection for nearly three years, said on Monday it has restarted output from its Tubarão Martelo offshore oil field near Rio de Janeiro after a four-month outage.

The restart came after Óleo e Gás, formerly known as OGX Petróleo e Gás Participações SA, received permission from Brazil's oil regulator ANP.

Output had been shut since March 6, when the field produced 6,222 barrels of oil, according to the Óleo e Gás website. That is barely a trickle of the up to 100,000 barrels per day of oil the field's OSX3 floating production storage and offloading platform was designed to produce.

Óleo de Gás did not say how much oil Tubarão Martelo is now producing.

Óleo e Gás was the oil and gas unit of Brazilian tycoon Eike Batista's EBX industrial group. EBX collapsed in the face of rising debt and project delays after OGX was unable to meet oil output projections.