Rio de Janeiro – This month, Petrobras completes 10 years producing pre-salt at Santos basin, in Brazil’s Southeastern coast, with 16 platforms and over 150 operating wells, accounting for 90% of all Brazilian pre-salt production. Out of the 30 most productive wells in the country, 29 are in that region, and the average production per well reaches 25,000 oil barrels a day, around four times more than the wells in the Gulf of Mexico, for example.
Over these last ten years, 2.5 billion barrels of oil equivalent were produced in the region. According to Petrobras, the extraction cost is below USD 7,000 per barrel.
According to Petrobras exploration and production director Carlos Alberto Pereira de Oliveira, “the unique features of Santos Basin pre-salt, such as its location in ultra-deep waters, a salt layer close to 2 km thick and 300 km away from the coast, created an unprecedent challenge for Petrobras and the industry. But this was no obstacle: ten years after the first oil from Tupi, not only we developed new solutions to overcome pre-salt obstacles, employing highly competent technicians, but also proved its economic feasibility and broke a series of records,” he said.
Records
In April, Petrobras-run operation in the pre-salt layer hit two new records: an average production of 1.94 million daily barrels of oil equivalent (BOE). Moreover, in May 16, the operation run at the Lula field surpassed the daily mark of 1 million barrels of oil per day (BPD).
According to Carlos Alberto de Oliveira, for the next ten years, the projection is to develop new pre-salt production projects in even more challenging conditions. “Most of the blocks acquired in the last auctions and recent discoveries are in even more deep waters, ranging from 2,500 to 3,000 meters, which is far from being an obstacle. The company is already studying new technological solutions to enable production in those areas, bringing together once again the company’s most significant technical talents,” said the director.
*With information from the ANBA Newsroom. Translated by Guilherme Miranda
