Subsea Projects Cost Reduction - Petrobras Approach, Results and Next Steps

Abstract

Abstract The Oil and Gas industry has faced an unpredictable and fast transformation in the last years. At first, there were barrel prices over U$ 100 dollars, which motivated a huge worldwide investment that pushed operators and the supply chain to respond to unprecedented growth. Due to the downturn in the oil prices, the challenge has moved towards achieving project feasibility in a low Brent scenario. The Brazilian subsea oil and gas industry has struggled with this context. Initially, with the Pre-Salt discoveries in 2006 it was necessary to develop breakthrough technological solutions to face this new frontier and to build 10 ultra deep-water production systems happen in just 10 years. Due to the recent price drop, Petrobras subsea engineering area has faced a demand to develop simpler and cost efficient solutions to reduce Pre-Salt CAPEX and OPEX. The objective of this paper is to review how Petrobras subsea area is dealing with these challenges since the discovery of Pre-Salt in 2006 until the current downturn of the oil and gas industry. As a reaction to that, Petrobras has been running an internal strategy called Subsea Cost Reduction Plan - PRCSub. The main purpose of this program is to search for the biggest cost reduction opportunities and to promote a full integration among Petrobras subsea team and suppliers. The PRCSub has delivered excellent results. Around US$ 500 million in savings were registered between 2014 and 2015 in the subsea scope, and between 25% of CAPEX reduction was achieved in Pre-Salt developments due to optimization initiatives for subsea design. The paper will present a review of the initiatives, describing the technical solutions and the new business model under construction by Petrobras.