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Quito –  The Ecuadorian government has completed contract renegotiations with several foreign oil firms, a process that concluded without a deal being signed with Brazil's Petrobras.

Petrobras was the only major foreign energy company that refused to accept the conditions set by the government, which is seeking to boost its share of petroleum revenue and ensure that any windfall profits from future oil price hikes accrue to the state.

Ecuador convinced Spain's Repsol-YPF - the Andean nation's biggest private operator - to accept the new contractual terms, although agreement was reached so close to the midnight Tuesday deadline that the paperwork for the new accord was not ready to be signed during a ceremony at the Non-Renewable Natural Resources Ministry.

The head of that ministry, Wilson Pastor, said that under the new agreements the state's share of oil revenue will rise from 70 percent to 80 percent, with the remainder going to the foreign companies.

That will mean an additional $5.4 billion will enter public coffers during the lifetime of the contracts, according to the ministry's calculations.

The companies choosing to remain in the country also have pledged to invest $1.2 billion, according to Pastor, who said during the ceremony that the results of the contract renegotiations "are very favorable to the country's interests."

Besides Repsol, the companies that signed the new deals were Chile's Empresa Nacional del Petroleo, or ENAP; Italy's Agip, a unit of Eni; and China's Andes Petroleum and PetroOriental, while South Korea's Canada Grande and U.S. oil firm Noble Energy joined Petrobras in refusing to ink a new accord.

The companies whose contracts will be canceled and will be forced to leave the country account for 14 percent of oil output in Ecuador by companies other than Ecuadorian state firms, Pastor said.

State oil company Petroecuador accounts for just over half of the country's total output of about 480,000 barrels per day, down from more than 500,000 bpd in 2007.

Strategic Sectors Minister Jorge Glas said the operations of the departing firms will be transferred, beginning Wednesday, "to the Ecuadorian state, to Petroecuador."

That transition will take a maximum of 120 days, according to Pastor, who said an environmental audit will be carried out and compensation will be paid based on the "market value" of the firms' assets.

The companies have the option of suing Ecuador in an international court for breach of contract, but Pastor said the government will provide "fair" compensation that obviates such a move.

Under the new service contracts, the state owns 100 percent of all output by the private companies, which will be paid a flat service fee per barrel extracted. The new deals provide the firms with a roughly 15 percent return on their investments at existing fields.

Companies must reduce their costs to increase profitability, Pastor said, noting that under the new agreements Ecuador will enjoy all the benefits of a potential future spike in oil prices.

Petrobras, meanwhile, did not accept the per-barrel service fee offered by Ecuador nor some of the legal provisions in the contract that restrict companies' capacity to sue the state for breach of contract.

The Brazilian company produces roughly 20,000 barrels of crude per day from Block 18 and the unified Palo Azul oil field in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a miniscule portion of the roughly 2.32 million barrels of oil equivalent per day the energy giant extracted from its domestic fields in the third quarter.

Most of the companies that agreed to the new deals will earn a per-barrel amount that is less than or roughly equal to what they were earning before, although Repsol will see its per-barrel take rise by $2.70 under the new service agreement.

The government made that concession "due to the significant new investments" totaling $293 million that the Spanish company has pledged to make over the next eight years.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa, a left-wing, U.S-trained economist, personally took part in the negotiations with Repsol and met Monday night with the company's representatives, a government spokesperson told Efe.

That intervention was critical to Repsol's decision to stay, the spokesperson said.

Petrobras is controlled by the Brazilian government and Brasilia was directly involved in the contract negotiations.

The company's decision will not affect bilateral relations, an adviser to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in statements published Wednesday.

"We discussed the issue in detail and took the decision that we saw fit," the president's adviser for international affairs, Marco Aurelio Garcia, told financial daily Valor.

"They didn't offer us anything better than (what Petrobras had) in the profit-sharing contract ... the (per-barrel) rate was not compensatory," the company's international area director, Jorge Zelada, told Valor.

The executive added that talks on compensation for Petrobras' investments in Ecuador will now begin, noting that that issue must be negotiated directly between the Brazilian company and the Ecuadorian government.