Brazil's state-held oil firm Petrobras launched on Friday a tender for three new Floating Production Storage and Offloading (FPSOs) units for one of the largest deepwater oilfields in the world, Búzios, as part of a development plan to have the field pump more than 2 million barrels of oil equivalent per day (boed).
The tender for the three new FPSOs is part of Petrobras' plan to have a total of twelve units installed at the Búzios oilfield by the end of this decade, the Brazilian oil firm said in a statement on Friday.
Once development is completed, the Búzios field is expected to produce more than 2 million boed, becoming Petrobras' largest production asset.
The field currently has four operational FPSOs.
The first of the three new units will be the FPSO Almirante Tamandaré with startup scheduled for the second half of 2024, while the other two units, P-78 and P-79, will be contracted under the Engineering, Procurement and Construction (EPC) model and are expected to start operating in 2025. FPSO Almirante Tamandaré will have a daily processing capacity of 225,000 barrels of oil, while the other two will have the capacity to process daily 180,000 barrels of oil each, Petrobras said.
Petrobras also aims to make better use of the associated natural gas in its prolific oil-rich pre-salt area by having offshore liquefied natural gas (LNG) units to process the gas, whose production has been rising with growing oil output in the area.
Offshore LNG liquefaction could be a solution to the associated gas from oil fields 100 miles off the coast and could reduce flaring, Viviana Coelho, Corporate Emissions and Climate Change Manager at Petrobras, said at a webinar earlier this month.
Petrobras currently ships the natural gas produced in the pre-salt area via pipelines to the coast, where it is processed. In the past, the Brazilian oil firm has said that insufficient infrastructure for natural gas production could limit its efforts to boost crude oil output in the pre-salt area.
By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com
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Comments
Still, once oil prices start to surge beyond $45, Petrobras’ new production could prove to be beneficial for Brazil’s economy adding some 585,000 barrels a day (b/d) by 2025. This will almost help offset current net Brazil crude oil imports of an estimated 640,000 b/d.
Dr Mamdouh G Salameh
International Oil Economist
Visiting Professor of Energy Economics at ESCP Europe Business School, London