Subsea Solutions to Anticipate the First Oil Production

Abstract

Abstract Brazilian pre-salt production development brought up a series of technological challenges to Petrobras over the last two decades. Despite all the innovations that have made feasible to produce oil in ultra-deep water, the deployment schedule of these projects still showed opportunities for improvement, according to other companies’ benchmark. Given the economical attractiveness of reducing the production schedule of greenfield development and the current increase of Petrobras production output subject to the term restrictions of the Production Sharing Contract, a strategic program has been implemented with focus on reducing the elapsed time since oil discovery until the start of its commercial production, also called PROD1000. This program considers all activities of a production development project, searching for optimizing governance, design, construction stages and deployment of production system so that first oil is anticipated. In subsea system, the term reduction strategy was based on four main pillars: interfaces pretreatment (ex. subsea & FPSO), agile bidding process, subsea components standardization and prequalification of suppliers.