Marine Technology Reporter Blogs - basin

Ativatec is a Brazilian company specialized in subsea technology and robotics engineering. The company was born at the Genesis Incubator at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in 2005. Today, Ativatec offers subsea services for Petrobras at the Campos Basin. Ativatec has a very good track record in developing new subsea technologies in partnership with government research institutes and universities such as FINEP, FAPERJ, PUC-Rio and Petrobras. Prizes and recognition from Petrobras for the services and products developed for the National Operator along the last 9 years, has earned Ativatec a preferred partner status with Petrobras and the company is recognized as one of the main Brazilian subsea robotic companies in the market.

The auction of Libra pre-salt field, forecast to contain between 8 and 12 billion barrels boe in recoverable reserves, was Brazil's first bidding round in the pre-salt area, and failed to meet the high expectations placed on it by the Brazilian government, yet the government, the ANP (National Oil Regulator) and Petrobras are highly satisfied with the results because they managed to attract important and experienced partners in Shell and Total, along with the high rolling Chinese companies. Despite a nine-month global publicity campaign and predictions of fervent bidding by as many as 40 firms, the license was awarded to the only consortium to register a bid. Another controversial state controlled company PPSA will oversee the contract’s implementation, having both voting and veto rights.

Remora is a Norwegian company, focused on providing solutions for offshore O&G loading. The company was established 2002 and has its head office in Stavanger, Norway and an office in Houston. Remora does business using a ship-owner structure by building, owning, leasing and operating HiLoad units. The range of HiLoad applications spans from offshore loading of crude oil, turret mooring of FSOs and FPSOs, as well as a mobile propulsion or DP system for seagoing vessels such as barges and floating rigs. The HiLoad concept is an innovative offloading solution which utilizes a ballasting system combined with a large square area of friction rubber which enables the HiLoad units to replace the water pressure on the tanker hull with no mechanical connection…

Back in 2009 I asked a good friend of my late father, who happened to be a long time Petrobras geologist, if he really knew the full potential of the pre-salt, after a while he looked up and said no not really, I know there are big fields out there, probably up to 10 billion boe in some reservoirs, possibly much more... Well, Petrobras kept on drilling and when Libra was found northeast of the Lula field (5 to 8 billion barrels boe), in 2010, the expectations ran high. Maybe 3.7 billion boe, maybe 15 billion boe. Probably 7.9, those are the numbers the ANP had in 2010. By May 2011 the ANP was downgrading it to 5 billion barrels boe.

Petrobras has set plans to spend $5.6 billion through 2016 to increase output at the Campos Basin mature fields which have had decreased outputs for some time. Most post salt fields at the Campos Basin have been in production since the 1980s, some of which have been major producers. A steep decline in production began around 2009, not only due to the aging fields having low reserves but also because of lack of investments in operational resources and equipment for the older fields. The national operator will invest $1 billion in new money and spend $4.6 billion in operating costs to boost efficiency in the offshore Campos Basin operating unit to historic levels of about 90%, up from 72% in the first quarter of 2012.

Even as Petrobras allegedly slows its exploration efforts, new discoveries are still being uncorked in the Santos Basin. While the national player announced the start up of the EWT in the Guará area in late December, yesterday a new deepwater pre-salt light oil accumulation is discovered in an adjacent area at the same BM-S-9 exploratory block. The Guara  EWT is producing through well SPS-55, and  is expected to last for five months with a daily production is estimated at 14,000 barrels of oil per day. The Guará area is located in block BM-S-9 and around 300 kilometers off the coast of São Paulo state. The recoverable O&G volumes in Guará are estimated at between 1.1 and 2 billion boe with a around 30º API.

With 8 exploratory wells producing hydrocarbon discoveries during the year and with estimates of recoverable oil of around 5 billion barrels, OGX ends 2009 on a very positive high.OGX Petróleo e Gás Participações S.A., announced two days ago that it had completed the drilling of well 1-OGX-2A-RJS, located in the BM-C-41 block, in the shallow waters of the southern part of the Campos Basin. OGX holds a 100% working interest in this block. The well was drilled to a depth of approximately 3,550 meters, resulting in the finding of hydrocarbons in five different reservoirs: Eocene, Upper Cretaceous, Albian, Aptian and Barremian. Once the drilling of the well was concluded…

The group that will be awarded the construction contract for this novel offshore LNG production unit will be known by October 31 Petrobras is keen to begin construction of the unit as it considers offshore natural gas liquefaction vital to guarantee a efficient output for the Santos Basin pre-salt gas. Many of the Santos Basin pre-salt fields are located over 300km from the coast, which convinced Petrobras to seek other options in order to deliver the gas to the market. Normally gas is transferred from wells to the coast through underwater pipelines but with such distances involved and with many of thereservoirs located in deep water…

Since 2007, Petrobras, along with national research institutes and industry suppliers, has been busy researching physical, chemical, geological, biological and socio-economic characteristics of the Campos Basin, a region that starts at the north end of the State of Rio de Janeiro all the way to the south of the State of Espirito Santo, encompassing an area of some 100 thousand square kilometers. The project has two main parts, one about fisheries and its socio-economic impact and the other about environmental issues, which is called the Habitat Project. The information is being transformed into a database, which will be used to support decision making concerning environmental issues, environmental management and will also be edited as a scientific publication.

It took a while to happen, but Petrobras and Chinese oil and petrochemical companies finally reached partnership agreements. Considering the scope of the Brazilian pre-salt and the expected growth of the Brazilian O&G market, these partnerships may become vital, as much more investments will be needed along the next 10 years. These partnerships in research and O&G exploration and production have been in negotiations for a long time but it took an official Brazilian delegation, headed by Brazilian President Dilma Rouseff, going to China, in order make it happen. It was a certainty in the market that this partnership would eventually come to be, it was just a matter of when it would happen and what it would encompass.

It was recently announced that all of OGX´s geophysical and geological software applications will be moved to Landmark´s DecisionSpace Desktop, which is a Halliburton owned company. "The integration of workflows and data such as rock, logs and seismic across domains in the DecisionSpace Desktop allows us to work more efficiently as we explore for hydrocarbons, improve our asset knowledge, and reduce our exploration risk.", said Marcos Amaral, OGX´s Executive Manager for New Technologies. "DecisionSpace Desktop's unique approach to reservoir description, known as Dynamic GeoModeling, is a no compromise, unified and dynamically updated interpretation and modeling system," said Gene Minnich, vice president of Landmark Software and Services.

Tests on a number of recently discovered adjacent wells, along with the first production well at Waimea Horizontal, support OXS´s claim that a new shallow water O&G province has been discovered at Block BM-C-41 in the southern Campos Basin. It is very significant when an acclaimed Geologist such as Paulo Mendonça, General Manager (Director) of OGX, comments that “This is one of the best production tests I have ever seen in my life”. Mr. Mendonça worked for decades in Petrobras and actively participated in ALL the major hydrocarbon reservoir discoveries made by Petrobras in Brazil, including the early Campos Basin boom, along with spearheading discoveries at the Espirito Santo and Santos Basins.

Using its Norwegian branch to launch a drillship operator is one of the options that Petrobras is evaluating in order to administer the 28 drillships the company plans to order.This option would entail creating a holding company as a subsidiary to Petrobras Netherlands B.V. (PNBV) to administer the operation of the 28 drillers to be ordered in the coming years in order to fulfill the drilling needs of the company´s aggressive exploratory campaign in looking for major reservoirs along the Santos Basin pre-salt. The main reason for using a PNBV subsidiary would be to speed up the company´s creation so as not to affect the planned exploratory schedule and also to decrease the company´s direct investment.

China Petrochemical (Sinopec) and the Chinese national oil company (CNOOC) are holding separate negotiations with OGX Petroleo e Gás in order to acquire 20% of an OGX deepwater play at the Santos Basin. In general we can see a marked increase in Chinese involvement and investments in Brazil.These negotiations are the most recent effort of Chinese oil companies in Latin America. Normally Chinese oil investments are driven to Asia, the Middle East and Africa, regions that historically concentrate the majority of Chinese imports in energy sources and raw material. As recently as May of this year, Sinochem Group, China’s biggest chemicals trader, agreed yesterday to pay $3 billion to Statoil ASA for 40 percent of the Brazilian offshore Peregrino field.

The recent discovery of hydrocarbon accumulations under the Albacora Leste field´s pre-salt layer confirms there potential of the Campos Basin to be a significant pre-salt producer.The recent oil discoveries in pre-salt layers under certain Petrobras concession areas in the Campos Basin are already being considered significant and tend to offer the possibility of production start-up in a much shorter time frame than the major pre-salt discoveries in the Santos Basin. This is due to the fact that the fields under which these new discoveries are located already have production infrastructure in place and whatever new subsea wellheads are installed will only need to be connected to one of the FPSOs, FSOs or rigs already in place.

This new pre-salt discovery in the Campos Basin, highlights the potential for new discoveries in both the pre and post salt layers of this mature basin, which up to now has been the main O&G producer in Brazil and until recently was considered by many as not having much more to give in terms of new reservoirs.Petrobras announced the discovery of a new accumulation of light oil (29o API) in the pre-salt layer of the Campos Basin, in water depths of 648 meters at the Marlim field. Marlim is located in the north-eastern part of Campos Basin, in water depths ranging from 648m to 1,050m. It has some 102 production wells and 50 injection wells. Over 80km of rigid pipelines and 400km of flexible lines have been laid on the field.

The two new discoveries in one well, announced by Petrobras last Thursday, strengthen the thesis pertaining to the possibility of the existence of a great reservoir beneath the salt layer of the Campos Basin. The Campos Basin pre-salt shows its potential even if volumes are less than at the Santos Basin, as various factors related to logistics, production timeline and development costs make this possibility very attractive to players and specially to Petrobras. As is widely known, the Campos Basin is presently responsible for over 80% of the Brazilian O&G production. The discoveries indicate the existence of hydrocarbons in both the pre-salt and the post-salt layers in a single well at the Barracuda field in the Campos Basin, 100km from the coast of  Rio de Janeiro.