Yesterday Petrobras and its partners in the BM-S-9 consortium started producing oil and natural gas on the FPSO Cidade de Caraguatatuba in the Santos Basin’s pre-salt Lapa field. The Cidade de Caraguatatuba is the third unit to come onstream in the pre-salt this year, and the 11th fully operational system lifting pre-salt deposits. Lapa is the third pre-salt field in the Santos Basin to start production, following in the footsteps of the Lula and Sapinhoá fields.

The Cidade de Caraguatatuba, a floating production, storage and offloading unit (FPSO) lies some 270 km off the São Paulo coastline at a water depth of 2,140 m, and has capacity to process 100,000 barrels of oil and compress 5 million m3 of gas per day. It is connected to production well 7-LPA-1D. The Lapa field is located in the BM-S- 9 concession, run by Petrobras (45%), in partnership with Royal Dutch Shell subsidiary BG E&P Brasil (30%) and Repsol Sinopec Brasil (25%).

Pre-salt output on the up and up
The Lapa field is starting production at a time of significant growth in pre-salt output. Petrobras now runs pre-salt facilities that already produce over 1.2 million barrels a day and in November output peaked to over a billion barrels of pre-salt crude. This was achieved by bringing ten high-output systems onstream in only six years, including the Lula Pilot (FPSO Cidade de Angra dos Reis), Sapinhoá Pilot (FPSO Cidade de São Paulo), Lula Nordeste Pilot (FPSO Cidade de Paraty), Lula/Iracema Sul (FPSO Cidade de Mangaratiba), Sapinhoá Norte (FPSO Cidade de Ilhabela), Lula/Iracema Norte (FPSO Cidade de Itaguaí), Lula Alto (FPSO Cidade de Maricá), Lula Central (FPSO Cidade de Saquarema), as well as FPSO Cidade de Anchieta and P-58, both in Parque das Baleias. Pre-salt wells already interconnected to existing production systems in the Campos Basin also helped achieve to this record.