Gabrielli: pre-salt supply chain tight

While operating in Brazil's pre-salt region does require an array of technologies, Petrobras CEO Jose Gabrielli told a Houston lunch that a bigger challenge lies in meeting logistical demands for operating in deep waters offshore. During the Brazil-Texas Chamber of Commerce event on 9 March 2010, Gabrielli said it is important to focus on 'the hubs that we must develop for our people and goods 300km from our coastline.' For the pre-salt, he elaborated, 'the main challenge that we have is much more on logistics, on the optimization of the knowledge we have.'

The opportunities in pre-salt, he said, are big, but they also require a new hub for suppliers. 'We believe the most important constraint that we may have is in the supply chain,' Gabrielli said.

To that end, the Brazilian operator as set up a web site aimed at smoothing the logistical hurdles and ensuring supplies are available as needed. For instance, Petrobras expects to require 49 VLCCs, 135 supply and service vessels, 45 production platforms, seven jackups or tension leg wellhead platforms, 140 manifolds, 629 compressors, 229 subsea wellheads and 417 subsea trees between 2009 and 2020.

By 2018, Petrobras is looking for 58 new drilling rigs, with 23 being delivered between 2009 and 2011, nine being charted in 2012 and the remaining 28 being built in Brazil between 2013 and 2018.

'We have a very big scale,' Gabrielli said. The company, he noted, operates 22% of global deepwater production.

Local content requirements will come into play with much of those items, he noted.

'It's not only that it's mandatory to have local content. Sometimes it's better to have local content,' he said. Local content requirements are a 'policy to attract investment in Brazil.'

Something else is attracting attention - if not investment - offshore Brazil, and that's the pre-salt opportunity. The country's pre-salt area spans 149,000km2 and has already yielded discoveries like the Tupi find, which holds an estimated recoverable base of 5-8 billion boe.

'We've had several wells tested with very good results, very high flow rates,' Gabrielli said. Petrobras has, he added, drilled 37 pre-salt wells with an 87% success rate. To develop the pre-salt, he said, Petrobras believes it needs improvements to existing technology rather than 'breakthrough' technologies. 'I can see where we need to improve existing technologies,' he said. Such improvements would be in the areas of flow assurance, reservoir characterization, deepwater CALM buoys, dry completion systems and FLNG designs. 'The first thing we need to do is identify the technological bottlenecks and then work together to solve them,' he said.

Petrobras intends to invest $4 billion in technology in the 2009-2013 period, with about half of that earmarked for E&P. The operator is also involved in partnerships with over 120 universities and research centers in Brazil and 20 institutions abroad.

Additionally, Petrobras has budgeted $174.4 billion in capex for 2009-2013 under that business plan. 'It's a challenge to do more than $31.1 billion per year for the next five years,' Gabrielli said. And he fully expects the next business plan to feature increased capex. Those increases, he said, are tied to the company's goal of reaching nearly 4 million b/d of production by 2020. 'We plan to double our production in 12 years,' he said.

Here, in the US, the Cascade/Chinook development in the Gulf of Mexico is expected to play its part in adding to Petrobras' output. The project, which features the first FPSO to operate in the US sector of the GoM, is expected to go online this summer. The FPSO will be served by a shuttle tanker, recently christened, that was built under Jones Act requirements.

'The shuttle tanker is a Jones Act shuttle tanker, which is an important local content requirement,' he said. 'Our local content requirements are much less strict than the Jones Act.'

by: Jennifer Pallanich,
jpallanich@offshore-engineer.com