Platform Ship Marechal Duque De Caxias Leaves China Heading For Brazil

Unit will be connected to equipment to reinject gas, still at the bottom of the ocean, in a pioneering way

The platform ship Marechal Duque de Caxias left this Saturday, 24/2, from Yantai, China, heading to the Mero field, operated by Petrobras, in the pre-salt of the Santos Basin. The platform will come into operation from September this year and has the capacity to produce up to 180 thousand barrels of oil and compress up to 12 million cubic meters of gas, all daily.

The unit, chartered by Petrobras from MISC, will be part of Mero's 3rd definitive production system and will increase the field's installed production capacity to 590 thousand barrels of oil per day. This production system provides for the interconnection of 15 wells to the unit, 8 oil producers and 7 water and gas injectors, through a subsea infrastructure made up of 80 km of rigid production and injection pipelines, 47 km of flexible service pipelines and 44 km of control umbilicals.

The platform, of the FPSO type (floating production, storage and transfer unit, for its acronym in English), will be interconnected to the HISEP equipment, which will separate the oil and gas at the bottom of the ocean, from where it will reinject the rich gas in CO2, in a pioneering way. HISEP, a technology patented by Petrobras, has the potential to increase production and relieve the surface gas processing plant, while reducing the intensity of greenhouse gas emissions. The FPSO has other technologies to reduce emissions, such as CCUS (Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage), where gas rich in CO2 is reinjected into the reservoir.

“Our focus is to produce responsibly and, in this sense, we have adopted technologies to increase efficiency in production and, in addition, we are constantly concerned with decarbonization in our activities, with cleaner production, with the intention of continuing on our trajectory of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions”, declared the director of Exploration and Production at Petrobras, Joelson Mendes.

Mero is the third largest field in Brazil in terms of volume of oil in place (what can be recovered in the reservoir), behind only Tupi and Búzios, also located in the pre-salt of the Santos Basin. In addition to the FPSO Duque de Caixas, Petrobras will put another unit into operation in Mero in 2025.

“We are continuing the Mero project, mainly to guarantee the country's energy security, as the potential of this field is very large and makes it one of the main assets of Petrobras, in which we will invest the efforts of our extremely qualified technicians”, summarized the director of Engineering, Technology and Innovation at Petrobras, Carlos José Travassos.

The operations of the Mero unitized field are conducted by the Consortium operated by Petrobras (38.6%), in partnership with Shell Brasil (19.3%), TotalEnergies (19.3%), CNOOC (9.65%), CNPC (9.65%) and Pré-Sal Petróleo SA (PPSA) (3.5%), as the Union's representative in the non-contracted area.