CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
Petrobras looks to disruptive
technologies to ensure all E&P
projects have ‘double resilience’
Innovations like True One Trip, all-electric completions
help to support strict goals around cost, emissions
João Henrique Rittershausen, Chief Pro-
duction Development Offi cer, Petrobras
BY LINDA HSIEH, EDITOR & PUBLISHER
João Henrique Rittershausen is Chief
Production Development Officer at
Petrobras. How are you addressing the challenge
with rising costs? Does that mean
fewer wells will be drilled?
What do you see as the biggest chal-
lenges for the drilling industry right
now? Not at all. We understand that oil prices
will always be volatile, so we have built
our projects to be resilient even at a Brent
oil price of $35 per barrel.
In our newest 2023-2027 business
plan launched in December, we outlined
$78 billion in CAPEX, with 83% going to
exploration and production. To ensure
project sustainability, all of our projects
are planned under the concept of Double
Resilience, which means they are resilient
both economically to $35 and environmen-
tally, with a carbon intensity of only 15 kg
of CO 2 equivalent per barrel.
Today, the biggest challenge is to com-
plete our drilling campaigns on schedule
and within budget. We have already seen
incremental increases in the dayrates for
rigs, and we also see problems in the sup-
ply chain due to the low level of operations
that the industry had seen in the past few
years. While Petrobras has not seen any
impacts on the timelines of our projects so
far, we do see challenges with the returns
of rigs that were in cold stack. Because
of the increase in drilling activity, we
understand that sometimes the only way
to have the rigs we need is to bring them
back from cold stack. So, in our planning
and our bids, we are allowing more time
for the mobilization of those rigs because
we understand that the rig contractors and
their sub-suppliers are seeing challenges
with both people and materials. They need
more time to bring those rigs back to nor-
mal operation mode in a way that will
ensure safety, integrity and reliability.
At the same time, we’re also increasing
the duration of the contracts we offer to
make it more feasible for the rig contrac-
tors to invest in bringing the rigs back to
operation. Overall, the industry has lost a lot of
experienced people in the past few years,
so this return in the market is not easy.
26 What is Petrobras doing to ensure this
type of resilience for your projects?
The answer to this is innovation. When
it comes to cost reduction, we cannot
just keep doing the same things in the
same ways. We need new technologies
and new equipment so that we can deliver
more cost-effective wells. For example,
Petrobras has developed our True One Trip
concept, which involves drilling the well
in just three phases and installing the
completion in one run. We’re also using a
drill-through wellhead system to reduce
drilling time by avoiding the need to trip
the BOP.
When you consider the first wells that
we drilled in pre-salt years ago, a well
would take us more than one year to drill.
Today we can drill that well in around 60
days. What about on the environmental
side? What are you doing to support
emissions reduction from drilling
operations? That is very important to the resilience
of our projects. Even though we know
that drilling operations are not the high-
est emitters in our projects, we need to
be very connected to this challenge, and
everyone must have plans on reducing
emissions. When we look at emissions reduction,
there are three big areas for us: wells,
FPSOs and subsea systems.
With wells, the best option to reduce
emissions is to reduce the time required
for well construction. That’s a win-win
because we will reduce both the cost and
the emissions. However, we can only
do this with cooperation among all the
companies involved – Petrobras, drilling
companies and service companies, and
this means we need to have better equip-
ment reliability. In a field like Búzios, for
example, where a single well can produce
60,000 barrels per day, reliability is very
important. We are also working to increase the effi-
ciency of diesel consumption through the
use of incentives with our contractors, as
well as additive technologies.
With FPSOs, we are investing a lot in
new designs to reduce emissions – for
example, topside electrification, optimiza-
tion of the seawater cooling system, as
well as carbon capture, utilization and
storage. In subsea systems, we are looking
at various initiatives like the application of
diverless solutions.
JAN UARY/FEB RUARY 2023 • D R I LLI N G CO N T R ACTO R