Having spent several days being bombarded with jaw-dropping activity and investment forecasts during a visit to the vibrant city of Rio de Janeiro, it’s time for a reality check.

You may have noticed occasional news items coming out of Brazil in recent months, unless you’ve been living in a hole.

There’s the buildup to the biggest single-sport event in the world taking place there next year when the football (or soccer as it’s known in the US) World Cup comes to town for four weeks mid-2014 to be played in what is the sport’s spiritual home. Sure, England invented it – but we can’t play it like they can.

I even saw the greatest footballer ever, Pelé, at the Rio de Janeiro airport as I left – one of my personal highlights of the year.

Then there’s the biggest multisport event in the world to follow, when in 2016 the Summer Olympics roll into town.

And for us oil folk, there was talk of Petrobras and its partners being likely to spend US $180 billion developing the Libra presalt megafield as part of the company’s push to double today’s production level and hit 4.2 MMboe by 2020. That’s all backed up by its forecast investment of up to $237 billion on E&P projects between now and 2017.

All these big numbers can daze a man, so I’m grateful to one of my worldly, wise colleagues for dragging me back to reality as we returned to our hotel through crawling rush-hour traffic after a busy day at OTC Brasil. “It’ll be chaos. These roads will be a disaster zone. They haven’t got the infrastructure in place to cope with the numbers that are coming. I can’t see how they’ll deal with it,” he said.

True, he was talking about the roads. But he could have been just as easily talking about Brazil’s offshore sector and infrastructure and the task that lies ahead of it – a task already stretching its staff and resources close to the limit, as well as its financial reserves.

Thanks to its presalt boom, for example, Brazil is the No.1 location for floating production projects in the planning stage, with 22% of “visible projects” located there, according to International Maritime Associates. We all know about the fleet of replicant FPSO vessels that Petrobras is having built. But it also is likely to need 12 production units for its Libra field, while the equally huge Jupiter field could need six. The already-producing Lula development will need another two, while there are at least seven others being considered.

Sorry, but I see an elephant in the room. The tender for the FPSO vessel for the Carioca field saw the contract go to Modec and Schahin Petroleo e Gas. But I hear the process only brought one bid, with a lease in the $700,000/d range. If that’s true it smashes through any previous lease rate ceiling for a floater and indicates something else: that there is real concern within the industry that Brazil’s local content policy is causing capex and opex on its projects to spiral upwards. Escalating costs have already caused majors to stall developments and have a rethink elsewhere – look at BP on Mad Dog and Woodside on Browse.

With Libra and Jupiter around the corner, soaring costs and resulting delays are the last things Brazil can afford – it’s got two big parties to pay for.

Offshore