Rio de Janeiro—The subsea area has been essential for Petrobras to achieve competitive gains over the past few years. The use of subsea equipment has helped to reduce presalt exploratory costs, contributing to Petrobras’ impressive output numbers.

According to Brazil’s state major, the application of new subsea technologies increased operational efficiency and reduced the extraction costs per barrel by 11%.

“Exploratory and production operations costs in the presalt were reduced to US $8 per barrel in a very short time. With arrangement optimization, changing of technical specification of equipment and better knowledge of the fields through simulators we have achieved 35% of cost cuts per year since 2010 in average,” Petrobras Executive Manager of Subsea Systems Cristina Pinho said.

The company has succeeded in many presalt fields. In 2015 the operator was honored during the Offshore Technology Conference for its achievements in ultradeep waters. The installation of the deepest steel lazy wave riser for Sapinhoá Norte (FPSO Cidade de Ilha Bela) at 2,140 m (7,021 ft) was one of them.

Now, to better manage subsea operations, Petrobras CEO Pedro Parente, who took the position in June 2016, has implemented a restructuring process, Pinho told SEN.

Through this new arrangement, Petrobras’ subsea division—which joins designing, installing, maintenance and decommissioning of flexible and rigid systems—received five subdivisions: Subsea Projects Implementation, Subsea Engineering, Subsea Equipment Services, Subsea Operation Services, and Operations and Investments Integration.

Pinho said the company already has purchased much of subsea equipment that will be needed over the next years. This includes pipelines, manifolds and christmas trees for the presalt. In addition, some items are not yet manufactured, such as umbilical and flexible lines.

“All the equipment we use in our subsea systems aggregate value in efficiency. We operate with larger diameter flexible lines, christmas trees with high reliability control systems, WAG [water alternating gas] manifolds, and submersible pumping systems.”

Currently, Petrobras’ greatest challenge is to have safer, more trustworthy and cheaper production than the previous years, according to the manager. “We must work to have impressive cost cuts in our projects along the way, which include capex and opex,” she said.

Petrobras Post-salt Fields

Despite having most of its investments in presalt assets, Pinho pointed out that post-salt mature fields in the Campos Basin also demand more subsea technology attention.

“Post-salt mature fields depend on the technology to expand their economic lifetime. We are working together with other important areas of the company in a decommissioning project, such as wells, logistics and operation in order to design decommissioning strategies for our systems in the subsea area to meet legal requirements, with safety and lower costs possible,” Pinho said. “We are improving procedures, technology and technical competence in the company as well as studying to improve the business model to be adopted for this task.”

Efficiency gains in the Campos Basin have led to more oil production.

“We are now working to innovate, using new technology procedures in order to keep the efficiency growth and to expand the economic production of those areas,” Pinho added.

Partnerships

Recently, Petrobras signed strategic alliance agreements with two other majors—Total and Statoil. Both agreements focus on technology. Pinho mentioned that the partnership with Total establishes studies in seven different subsea areas: long distance wells interconnection in the pre-salt, digital petrophysics, 4-D seismic, closed reservoirs production optimization, origin and detection of CO2 in reservoirs throughout the South Atlantic coast, technology for capex and opex reduction in wells construction, and cognitive computing. “Those technologies provide cost cuts for oil and gas projects and improve risk management in our exploratory portfolio.”

The manager also mentioned that Petrobras has a partnership with Galp, focusing on exploratory activities, production development and oil and gas infrastructure through a training program in carbonatic reservoirs in deep waters.

—Brunno Braga

Offshore