Offshore Brazil FPSO Starts Production

Shell Brasil Petroleo Ltda. and its consortium partners in the Lula North pre-salt deepwater project offshore Brazil have started production from the project, Royal Dutch Shell plc reported Friday.

Located in the Santos Basin, Lula North is the latest area of the Lula field – Brazil’s largest producing oil and gas field – to go onstream. The Petrobras-operated P-67 floating production and storage offloading (FPSO) vessel processes production from Lula North and boasts a capacity of up to 150,000 barrels of oil and 6 million cubic meters of natural gas per day, Shell noted in a written statement emailed to Rigzone.

According to Shell, the P-67 production hub is the seventh FPSO deployed at Lula and the third in a series of standardized vessels built for the consortium that includes Shell, Petrobras and the Galp subsidiary Petrogal Brasil. As Rigzone reported last October, Shell and its partners achieved first oil from Lula Extrema South via the P-69 FPSO.

“The Brazilian pre-salt fields are some of the best deepwater provinces in the world,” Shell Upstream Director Andy Brown remarked back in October. “With significant flow rates, deep-water Brazil projects are breaking even under $40 per barrel.”

Shell operates 27 offshore Brazil concessions spanning 2.7 million acres. The company owns a 25-percent stakes in the Lula consortium. Petrobras and Petrogal Brasil own the remaining 65-percent and 10-percent interests, respectively.