PetroRio is a young, Brazilian independent oil producer whose acquisitions tend to raise the same question: “How do you make money from old brownfields? That is the question we have always heard,” said Iuri Rossi, subsea coordinator at PetroRio. The answer has existed since small companies began buying the discards from big oil companies looking for the next giant field—cut costs and invest some of the earnings to extend the productive life of the existing platform. At this year’s Offshore Technology Conference (OTC), Rossi provided an example by describing how PetroRio acquired two nearby fields in the Campos Basin to create a single, profitable unit (OTC 31900). It began with the acquisition of the Polvo field (Portuguese for “octopus”) in 2016, shortly after the launch of the privately owned company. The purchase from BP included a floating production platform and a costly leased floating, production, storage, and offloading (FPSO) vessel capable of handling many times the 8,000 B/D output of the aging field. The value of the Octopus field became apparent only in 2020 after the company made two more acquisitions: First, it purchased an FPSO on the nearby field Tubarão Martelo (Portuguese for “hammerhead shark”); later that year it also bought the field. Those deals offered a solution—build a pipeline from the Polvo platform to the Tubarão Martelo FPSO and dump the leased FPSO. The $45 million spent to marry the field saved $50 million a year, generating cash to support a future that will include more drilling, Rossi said. The cost-cutting moves also included small deals such as buying an obsolete drilling rig for $1.00, then getting it running again and using it to work over wells. “We bring a new mindset; so, we say, ‘let’s try it,’” Rossi said. New thinking and more investment in the Campos are what Brazil needs as Petrobras and other big companies sell off smaller holdings in the rich basin that made the country a major oil producer before the ultradeepwater pre-salt play in the Santos Basin eclipsed it. But there is a lot of oil left in the Campos. Equinor reported that its partnership with Petrobras has a goal of adding 1 billion bbl of production to the Roncador field alone (OTC 31729). Still, at age 40 it is a mature play, along with the North Sea and the US Gulf of Mexico (GOM). Petrobras recently announced it would allocate $5 billion to work in the Campos from a $20-billion fund to provide the infrastructure needed to promote offshore development. “The Campos Basin plays a very strategic role for Petrobras in the future. Two-thirds of the production [there] in 2026 will come from investments made right now,” said Eduardo Bordieri, executive strategy manager for Petrobras, while presenting a paper on the future of the Campos at an OTC session (OTC 31883).