Brazilian oil giant Petrobras and its partners in the BM-S-9 consortium started the oil and natural gas production on Monday in the Lapa field, in the Santos Basin pre-salt layer, through the FPSO Cidade de Caraguatatuba.
According to Petrobras, this is the third unit to enter operation in the pre-salt this year, and the 11th largest definitive system operating in this layer. In addition, Lapa is the third pre-salt field of the Santos Basin to start production, after Lula and Sapinhoá.
Located approximately 270 km from the coast of the São Paulo state, at 2,140 m water depth, this Floating Production Storage Offloading Unit has the capacity to process daily 100 thousand barrels of oil and compress 5 million m3 of gas, and is interconnected to the Lapa field through production well 7-LPA-1D.
The FPSO arrived at the field in June and it was scheduled to start production in August.
The Lapa field is located at the BM-S-9 concession, operated by Petrobras (45%), in partnership with BG E&P Brasil – a subsidiary company of Royal Dutch Shell plc (30%) – and Repsol Sinopec Brasil (25%).
Oil production operated by Petrobras at the pre-salt layer already exceeds 1.2 million barrels per day. In November, the company reached the 1 billion barrels mark of oil produced in the pre-salt layer.