The crisis hitting global markets could make it more difficult for Brazil oil giant Petrobras to fund its ambitious plans to tap vast pre-salt oil reserves, the company's president Jose Sergio Gabrielli has said.

The company needs to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in the coming years to tap the oil, which lies up to seven kilometres below a thick layer of salt, Reuters reported.

The financial crisis could squeeze funding sources for Petrobras and its suppliers of crucial equipment, such as the deep-sea oil rigs that can cost more than $500 million each to build.

Petrobras has leased about 80% of the world's deepest-drilling offshore rigs and plans to double its rigs in deep and ultra-deepwater to 63 by 2017. Twenty-eight of the new rigs are to be built in Brazil.

The crisis has "consequences that are not yet fully realised in financing this market," Gabrielli added.

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