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With the price of oil hovering near $ 100 a barrel, the discovery of the biggest deep-water oil field off the southeastern coast has the potential to transform Brazil into a global energy powerhouse and to reshape the politics of this energy-starved continent.

While Brazil’s state oil company, PETROBRAS, has known of the field for more than a year, it only finished assessing its full potential in recent months. It announced on Nov. 8 that the field held some five billion to eight billion barrels of crude oil and natural gas.

The announcement has everyone in the region, and beyond, taking notice. A field that size — the biggest in the world since a discovery in Kazakhstan in 2000 — is a potential political game-changer for Brazil.

In the next five years it is conceivable that Brazil could move ahead of Mexico and Canada in total oil reserves, becoming second only to Venezuela and the United States in the energy pecking order of the Americas.

This is heady stuff for Brazil, a country that only last year became a net energy exporter mostly because of its aggressive push into sugar-cane ethanol and hydroelectric power.

“All of a sudden Brazil is emerging as an energy power”, said Peter Hakim, president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a policy group in Washington focusing on Latin America. “Everything they have developed, from soybeans to sugar to oil is suddenly working. They have had amazing luck.”

There is little doubt that the find gives Brazil new influence against energy players like Bolivia and Venezuela, and not just in the economic competition among energy suppliers, but in the political arena as well.

Much to the chagrin of the United States, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, has used his nation’s oil wealth to aggressively push a leftist agenda at home and abroad. The Brazilian field, known as Tupi, now has the potential to lend more weight to Brazil’s more moderate, leftist approach.

Already countries around the region have been quick to sense the potential threats and benefits. With news of the discovery coming just ahead of a meeting of Latin American leaders in Santiago, Chile, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, acknowledged there during the meeting that he was being “treated with a certain deference” by the other leaders.

Mr. Chávez nervously jested that Mr. da Silva was now an “oil magnate”. He also quickly suggested that the two nations create an Amazonian energy region similar to the Caribbean and Andean integration efforts Venezuela had been pushing for.

Internet: <www.nytimes.com> (adapted).