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
CRITICAL ISSUES IN DRILLING & COMPLETIONS
TOP Petrobras awarded a 5.8-year
contract last year for the Petrobras 10000
drillship, which offers Transocean’s
patented dual-activity technology.
BOTTOM Petrobras plans to implement
18 new FPSOs in the next fi ve years,
including the P-71 (pictured) . The NOC
says it’s investing signifi cantly in new
FPSO designs that will allow for reduced
emissions. What do you think of when it comes to
the future of drilling and wells?
We would like to have autonomous
rigs and disruptive drilling technologies.
In the long term, we would like both
our drilling rigs and our FPSOs to be
unmanned – but, of course, this is not
going to be easy. When you talk about
an unmanned operation and autonomous
rig, everything must be redesigned, and
we need to have much higher levels of
reliability than what we have today. I
don’t think we can just take today’s rigs
and transform them into an autonomous
rig; it will require a completely different
approach. Digitalization will be a key enabler, and
we need to automate the processes around
well planning, design and operation, as
well as have integration with the supply
chain. We will need well structure alterna-
tives, high-performance completions, real-
time integrity monitoring, rigless mainte-
nance, and wells that can self-stimulate
and be self-abandoned.
Of course, this is all a vision for the
future. We don’t have a project saying we
will have an autonomous rig within a cer-
tain time period, but these are things we
are always studying and thinking about.
Along the way, it can also inspire the
development of other new technologies
that we can implement today.
In October last year, Petrobras
selected seven rigs from a “mega ten-
der,” and all the rigs are required to be
ready for operation in 2023. What is
Petrobras doing to make sure that it
will be ready to start so many drilling
rigs and campaigns?
From Day 1 after signing the contract, we
are working closely with the rig contrac-
tors to review lessons learned with previ-
ous rigs that have undergone acceptance
tests. We also have careful planning and
talk about how we will commission the rig,
then look at their people and skills. When
we start a new rig, it’s important that we
are not just taking experienced people from
other rigs that are already in operation.
Also, I would also say it is not unusual
for Petrobras to start multiple rigs in a short
time period. In addition to the rigs, from
2023 to 2027 we will also be implementing
18 new FPSOs, which will be half of all the
FPSOs delivered worldwide in that time
period. We will do very detailed planning,
and we’ll be successful in starting these
operations in the schedule that we need.
Petrobras has invested significantly in
the Equatorial Margin. How does that
region fit into your plans for the next
few years?
Nearly half of Petrobras’ $6 billion of
exploration CAPEX from 2023 to 2027 will
go to the Equatorial Margin. It is very
important to Petrobras to start working in
this new frontier region, and we hope to
begin drilling the first well there in early
2023. We believe this frontier has significant
potential, and opening this new explora-
tion area will bring a lot of value both for
Petrobras and Brazil.
Q&A with João Henrique Rittershausen,
Petrobras, continued on page 31
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