He has taught courses and led work teams that have made important discoveries of deposits of potassium salts and oil in the Sergipe-Alagoas and Amazonas basins.
[1] Szatmari has published over 200 works, including articles in scientific journals, monographs and technical reports, and jointly edited the book Salt - Geology and Tectonics.
[2] One of Szatmari's most important contributions is on the formation of oil via catalytic reactions of the Fischer-Tropsch type, as serpentization of mantle's peridotites.
He also performed studies on the distribution of metals present in petroleum, comparing them with the mantle rocks, chondrites, crust, and seawater.
[1][3][4] His recent research work, with others at Petrobras and its private partners (British Gas BG, Repsol of Spain and GALP of Portugal), on the oil deposites deep beneath the salt layer in the Santos Basin (the continental crust extending about 700 kilometers offshore in the region of the São Paulo) has been mentioned in the Brazilian national press.