Brazil: Petrobras installs platform capable of extracting 6% of crude oil production

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Brazilian oil company Petrobras announced on April 2 the entry into operation of the Guanabara deepwater exploitation platform, capable of extracting 6% of Brazil’s current hydrocarbon production.

The gigantic platform, installed in Mero, a deepwater field in the Santos marine basin in the Atlantic Ocean, can produce up to 180,000 barrels of oil per day and 12 million cubic meters of gas per day, the largest Brazilian company informed in a communiqué.

Petrobras is the operator and majority partner (38.6 %) of the consortium, which has the rights to exploit the vast reserves of the Mero field, which also includes the multinationals Shell (19.3 %) and TotalEnergies (19.3 %), and the Chinese state-owned CNPC (9.65 %) and CNOOC Petroleum (9.65 %). The Brazilian state owns the remaining 3.5 %.

The Mero field, located some 150 kilometers off the coast of the Brazilian state of Rio de Janeiro and in a region of the Atlantic where the depth reaches 1,930 meters, has hydrocarbons in the so-called pre-salt, a promising exploitation horizon discovered by Petrobras under a layer of salt two kilometers thick.

After Buzios and Tupi, Mero is the third-largest field in the pre-salt, whose enormous reserves already account for more than half of Brazil’s production and may turn Brazil into one of the world’s largest crude oil exporters.

According to Petrobras, Guanabara, an FPSO (floating production, storage, and transfer of oil and gas) type oil platform, is the first of four that will be installed in this field until 2026.

“The platform’s weight is 102,433 tons, equivalent to 258 Boeing 747 airplanes; its height is 172 meters, equivalent to almost five statues of Christ the Redeemer, and its extension is 332 meters or three soccer fields,” according to Petrobras’ statement.

The state-owned company added that the gigantic metallic structure could generate 100 megawatts of energy, enough to supply a city of 330,000 inhabitants.

In its first phase of operations, the platform was connected to six producing wells and seven injectors and is expected to reach peak production by the end of 2022.

“Guanabara is the most complex oil production unit to operate in Brazil. The implementation of a project with this technology results from more than a decade of learning in the pre-salt. The project was conceived to combine production capacity, efficiency, and reduction of pollutant gas emissions,” said Petrobras’ Production Development director, Joao Henrique Rittershaussen.

The executive explained that the platform has systems that allow natural gas containing more than 45% carbon dioxide (CO2) to be re-injected into the reservoir to reduce polluting gas emissions.

With information from EFE