|
 Brazil's state-controlled oil multinational company Petrobras has plans to invest US$ 2 billion to US$ 3 billion to begin prospecting in the giant deposit of Tupi, which has estimated recoverable reserves in the range of 5 to 8 billion barrels of crude and natural gas.
According to Petrobras CEO, José Sérgio Gabrielli de Azevedo, the initial investment will be destined to the purchase of a deep water prospecting rig, floating systems and other equipment necessary to advance the exploration pilot project.
In an interview with the daily O Estado de S. Paulo, Gabrielli said the corporation's target is to have the Tupi pilot project working by 2010, with an initial production in the range of 100.000 barrels per day.
"We still don't have the definitive estimates, but they shouldn't be too different from our current costs. Maybe a little bit higher, which means we will have investments in the range of 2 to 3 billion US dollars for the pilot project," he said.
Petrobras exploration and production director, Guilherme Estrella, said that Petrobras hopes to declare Tupi's commercial viability in 2008 or 2009, but it already has teams of experts working on the field development scheme.
"Before the end of the year, they have to come up with concrete concept proposals on how to use the gas that comes jointly with oil, because this will define how we are going to develop the area," Estrella said.
Petrobras has also said it saw good prospects for major oil finds in the sub-salt areas in the Campos and Espírito Santo basins north of Santos, but Estrella said Santos remained the immediate priority.
Petrobras partners in Tupi or other Santos sub-salt blocks include Britain's BG Group, Spain's Repsol and Galp of Portugal.
Tupi lies far from the coast, which is densely populated and has environmentally-sensitive areas, which would make it extremely difficult to build a gas pipeline to the shore.
"We have an enormous opportunity of having a new approach to production systems different from traditional models," Estrella said.
"Normally, you'd mount an FPSO (floating production, storage and offloading) rig on a field, lay a pipeline to the coast, then install several more rigs and end up with a big production complex. This one we could treat as a giant production complex from the very start with shared structures, replicated projects, system management," he said.
Petrobras is considering to have floating power plants anchored around the field that would use associated natural gas, sending their electricity to mainland via sub-sea cables and straight to oil production rigs.
"This simplifies rig projects enormously as they won't need generating modules," he said.
Excess natural gas can be immediately liquefied at ship-based liquefier units and then sent to re-gasification terminals on the coast, which Petrobras is already building, or processed into diesel using the so-called gas-to-liquids technology.
"Then far at sea you can have an intertwined, independent energy system. Nobody has tried it yet, but we don't see technological obstacles there," Estrella said.
In related news Petrobras announced that on November 23 production tests began at Platform P-52 in Roncador oil field in the Campos basin 125 kilometers off shore.
P-52 is a semi-submersible production unit with a capacity to process 180,000 barrels a day of oil, to compress 9.3 million cubic meters a day of gas, and to inject about 300,000 barrels a day of water into the reservoir. It is installed in 1,800 meters of water, a Brazil record.
The platform initially will handle volumes of about 20,000 barrels a day but is expected to reach its total capacity of 180,000 barrels a day in mid-2008 when it will be interconnected to 18 production and 11 water injector wells. The platform's hull was built in Singapore, and its operating modules were manufactured in Brazil.
Mercopress
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.