(TN) Petrobras invested BRL 600 million in the largest seismic campaign in ultra-deep waters in the world, concluded at the end of April in the Tupi field and in the Iracema area, in the Santos Basin pre-salt, on the southeastern coast of Brazil. Lasting one year, the operations covered an area of 3,164 km², equivalent to more than twice the size of the city of São Paulo. The company that acquired the data was Shearwater.
Tupi, for example, was the first field discovered in the Santos Basin pre-salt layer. Thirteen years after Petrobras began its development, it is still the industry’s largest ultra-deepwater producing asset in the world. “It was in the Tupi field where we launched our pre-salt journey, breaking a series of paradigms, developing new technologies and paving the way for a new exploratory frontier. Since then, we have accumulated achievements and this seismic campaign was one of them”, said the executive manager of Exploration at Petrobras, Jonilton Pessoa.
With the collected seismic data, Petrobras intends to map new opportunities to boost complementary development projects in Tupi and Iracema. “This seismic campaign will allow the identification not only of remaining oil in the area, but also of new targets for complementary projects. The expectation is that the seismic data will provide images of the most complex areas in the region”, added Jonilton.
This seismic acquisition will generate around 400 terabytes of data (equivalent to the storage of 2000 traditional notebooks), which will be used to generate the image of the rock layers. For the campaign, Petrobras mobilized four seismic vessels, two support vessels and three offshore robots for remote operations (ROV). In all, approximately 140 people were involved in the seismic operations.
Emission Reduction
The company used three seismic sources simultaneously (triple source), a solution it has been adopting since 2021 to increase efficiency and speed up campaigns. With this innovation, the company reduced the duration of the campaign in Tupi and Iracema by around 30%, consequently allowing for a reduction of practically 30% in greenhouse gas emissions.
The Tupi Consortium is formed by Petrobras (67.216%), Shell (23.024%), Petrogal (9.209%) and PPSA (0.551%).
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