Keppel/Technip on Course to Deliver Petrobras P-52 FPU

When the P-52 FPU is operational, Keppel’s projects for Petrobras would have contributed over 50 percent of Brazil’s total oil production capacity of about 1.8m barrels of oil per day.

The consortium of Keppel Offshore & Marine Ltd (Keppel O&M) and Technip Engenharia S/A is on track to deliver the P-52 floating production unit (FPU) to Petrobras Netherlands BV (PNBV) in the third quarter of 2007. This P-52 FPU was the first project for which Petrobras imposed a minimum 60% of the total work to be carried out in-country when the project was put out for tender in 2002. The Keppel/Technip consortium has more than met the requirement.

The project also won accolades from Petrobras for excellence in project management and execution in the PRODEP award for two consecutive years in 2005 and 2006. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and Mrs Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s Minister for Internal Affairs and Godmother of P-52, were at Keppel FELS Brasil’s BrasFELS shipyard to witness the christening ceremony of Brazil’s largest semisubmersible.

With the delivery of the P-52, Keppel O&M’s projects for Petrobras would have contributed at production capacity, 990,000 barrels of oil per day (bopd). This represents over 50% of Brazil’s present production rate of 1.8 million bopd.

Currently, Latin America has proven reserves of 115b barrels of oil. In Brazil’s bid to become a net exporter of energy, its national oil company, Petrobras, has budgeted a total investment of more than $87b for 2007-2011 and about 60% of the budget has been allocated for exploration and production. It has also announced plans to build and convert more floating production units such as semisubmersibles and floating production storage and offloading (FPSOs) facilities.

P-52 is a FPU that stands at a height equivalent to 34 storeys and has the breadth of 10 Olympic swimming pools. The platform will be anchored in a depth of 1,795 metres in the Roncador field, off the Campos Basin in Brazil, and will have the capacity to produce 180,000 bopd with medium API gravity of 28 and 9.3 million m3/day of gas. In addition to the P-52 project, the Keppel/Technip consortium is also building the P-51 FPU. They have just completed the construction of the lower hull, the modules and the deckbox and will soon conduct the marine mating of the deck box and spider deck weighing a total of some 49,000 tonnes. Over in Singapore, Keppel Shipyard, another subsidiary of Keppel O&M, is completing the conversion of the P-53 FPSO and has just started work on Petrobras’s first gas FPSO, the Espirito Santo, for Prosafe Production.