10 November 2013, News Wires – Top officials were in Brazil’s Rio Grande del Sul on Friday to celebrate the winding up of work on the P-58 floating production, storage and offloading unit, one of many this year due to be hooked up in a major production push by state player Petrobras.
Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff and Petrobras chief executive Maria das Gracas Foster visited the Estaleiro Honorio Bicalho to check out the unit.
The pair also toured hulls that will be part of other “replicant” FPSOs scheduled to be used by Petrobras on unlicenced pre-salt acreage.
The latest unit speaks to the strength of Brazil’s re-emerging domestic shipbuilding industry, Rousseff said, according to a Petrobras statement.
“But we were stubborn, Graca too, persisting in the idea of building vessels in Brazil,” she said.
The P-58 is due to produce first oil from both post-salt and pre-salt horizons in the Parque das Baleias complex in the Campos basin in late November.
The facility will be capable of producing 180,000 barrels per day of oil and 6 million cubic metres per day of natural gas.