Rio de Janeiro – In March, the Brazilian state-owned oil company Petrobras broke its monthly production record for oil and natural gas in Brazil, having attained an average extraction rate of 2,315,276 barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) per day. The result is 9.5% higher than the volume produced in the same month of last year, and 3% higher than in February this year.
Separate production in the country’s fields reached 1,991,934 barrels per day, surpassing average production in March 2008 by 10.6% and average production in February this year by 2.7%, another record-high result in the history of the company.
The figures were disclosed last Friday (24th) by Petrobras, which ascribed the result to increased output in the Campos Basin, in the north of the state of Rio de Janeiro, as new wells entered into production in some areas. That led to increased extraction in platforms P-53 and FPSO Cidade de Niterói, in the Marlim Leste Field; and in P-54, in the Roncador field.
Petrobras also informed that on March 19th, it managed to extract 2,042,559 barrels of oil, the highest output ever recorded by the state-owned company in a single day.
Natural gas output in national fields reached 51,407 million cubic metres per day in March, a result higher than the 48,867 million cubic metres a day produced in February 2009.
The figures indicate that adding up the output in the company’s fields in Brazil and abroad, total oil and natural gas production reached a daily average of 2,537,873 BOE in March. The result was 8.5% higher than the output in the same month of 2008, and 4.3% higher than the volume extracted in February this year.
The volume of oil and natural gas extracted in the nine countries in which Petrobras produces, in BOE, reached 222,597 per day, 1.9% less than the volume produced in the previous month and 1% less than the output recorded in March 2008.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
