BG Group plans to invest more than $2 billion on research and development in Brazil's oil industry in a bid to become the country's biggest foreign producer by 2020, the Financial Times newspaper reported Sunday on its website, citing the head of the company's Brazilian operations, Nelson Silva.

Silva said BG's total investments in Brazil before 2020 could be in the "tens of billions," the report said.

"In the nineties we made a strategic decision to invest in Brazil's oil industry. Then the discovery of the Lula field, one of the biggest in the world, just made Brazil even more attractive," the report quoted him as saying.

Silva said the R&D budget of more than $2 billion would be spent by 2025, mainly on building a global technology center to house up to 100 researchers and setting up training programs in Brazilian universities, according to the report.

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