A Petrobras-led consortium is assessing the possibility to start commercial output from a 10th floating production, storage and offloading vessel in the giant Lula pre-salt field in the Santos basin off Brazil in 2022.
Portugal’s Galp Energia, which holds a 10% working interest in Lula, believes production from the western section of the field may happen in a three-year horizon.
“When it comes to Lula West, it is now being discussed in the consortium what is the best solution. In our plans, we have factored in contribution of first oil in 2022,” said Galp executive director and head of exploration and production Thore Kristiansen.
Upstream understands that output from Lula West may flow from the P-71 FPSO.
Chinese yard CIMC Raffles is in charge of building the floater hull, with delivery scheduled for the second half of 2019. The P-71, which will have capacity to process 150,000 barrels per day of oil and 6 million cubic metres per day of natural gas, will be fitted with an anchor-mooring system rather than a more complex turret mooring system.
Sources have said the Jurong Aracruz shipyard in Brazil will be responsible for the supply and integration of topsides modules for this unit, representing a vote of confidence for the company’s facility in Espirito Santo state.
The P-71 was originally pencilled in to produce from the Sururu pre-salt field, but Upstream was told a joint development with the adjacent Berbigao field is now likely via the P-68 FPSO, which is currently undergoing integration at Jurong Aracruz.
“There is now very important finishing work that is happening at the Jurong shipyard, and we are expecting first oil from the P-68 in the second half of this year,” Kristiansen told a conference call last week.
Plans to switch the location of the P-71 were put in motion in late 2017 after Petrobras and partners in the Lula field, including Galp and Anglo-Dutch supermajor Shell, saw encouraging results from an extended well test at Lula West.
Results from the well test at Lula West, via a tie-back to the Cidade de Angra dos Reis FPSO, were much better than the one carried out in 2014.
The well flowed at rates of about 20,000 bpd, which was more than twice the original test, and in line with average output from the wider Lula play, prompting the partners to sanction the Lula West development.
Petrobras is currently producing from nine FPSOs at Lula. Two units — P-67 and P-69 — began operations recently and are expected to reach plateau output by the end of the year, finally lifting production from the field above the 1 million bpd threshold.
The P-71 was originally ordered in 2010 as one of eight replica FPSO hulls to be built in Brazil by local player Ecovix.
To date, only three of these replica units have entered production. A fourth, the P-68 at Berbigao-Sururu, is earmarked for the second half of this year, while a fifth, the P-70 in the Atapu pre-salt field, is scheduled for 2020.
The P-71 would be the sixth such unit to be delivered. CIMC Raffles was initially negotiating to also build the hulls for the final two floaters — P-72 and P-73 — but Petrobras only agreed to order one unit, as the company was not ready to finance the construction of the rest.
