Petrobras to retender P-72 – P-73 FPSOs new design
The Brazil national oil company (NOC) Petroleo Brasileiro SA (Petrobras) is preparing the second call for tender for the integration of the floating, production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessels P-72 and P-73 with a new design resulting from the relocation of these replica FPSOs within the Santos Basin offshore Rio de Janeiro.
Originally, the P-72 and P-73 FPSOs were the two last replica units of the FPSOs series of eight vessels identified from P-66 to P-73.
According to Brazilian regulation on the local content, all these FPSOs were due to be designed, built and integrated in Brazilian shipyards.
But the accumulations of projects as complex and as large as these FPSOs in the local shipyards, sometime not even existing when awarded, generated huge bottlenecks and caused major delays in Petrobras production plans.
For this series of eight FPSOs, Petrobras selected Estaleiro Rio Grande (ERG) shipyard for the construction of the hulls.
Then Petrobras sanctioned the integration of the topsides for the first six FPSOs of this series from P-66 to P-71:
– P-66 Lula South to Keppels Fels
– P-67 Lula North to Mendes Junior – OSX
– P-68 Lula Far South to Jurong Shipyard
– P-69 Lula West to Keppels Fels
– P-70 Iara Horst to Mendes Junior – OSX
– P-71 Iara North West to Jurong Shipyard
Then the allocation of the P-72 and P-73 were left pending in the meantime to see how first FPSOs construction should move on.
In order to compensate the delay taken by these last two FPSOs P-72 and P-73, Petrobras received the approval from Brazil Government to charter two substitutes FPSOs.
CENPES completed P-72 and P-73 FPSOs new FEED
In 2013, Petrobras organized a call for tender to charter these two FPSOs under the name of:
– Cidade de Marica
– Cidade de Saquarema
This charter contract was finally awarded to the tandem SBM Offshore and Quieroz Galvao Oil & Gas (QGOG).
With this charter contract the Cidade de Marica and the Cidade de Saquarema FPSO will be able to start operations on December 2015 and February 2016 at the Lula Alto field and Lula Central field respectively.
In the meantime Petrobras decided to relocate:
– P-72 to Tupi North East
– P-73 to Iara Surround
Because of this relocation, the process of the FPSOs had to be redesigned in order to match with the higher content of hydrogen sulfide of the new blocks .
CENPES, the engineering branch of Petrobras, performed the second front end engineering and design (FEED) of the P-72 and P-73 FPSOs.
After this redesign, the P-72 and P-73 FPSOs should keep their original template capacity of 150,000 barrels per day (b/d).
Petrobras is planning to call for tender the integration of the P-72 and P-73 FPSOs topsides on the third quarter 2014 in targeting the first production at Tupi North East and Iara Surround in 2018.
