Petrobras: The deep-water riser riddle

The main obstacle facing scientists and engineers at Brazil's Petrobras is designing risers to connect the bottom of the ocean to floating production platforms as upstream operations push into water depths approaching 3,000 metres, says Jacques Braile Saliés, manager of Procap-3000. Tom Nicholls reports

IT WILL not be long before Petrobras needs to deploy technology for producing oil in water depths approaching 3,000 metres. Although it has not yet made any discoveries offshore Brazil in water depths of this order, the Brazilian firm is involved in ventures in the US Gulf of Mexico where many of the systems developed under the Procap-3000 deep-water research programme will be applicable. Water depths at Chinook are nearly 2,700 metres, at Cascade almost 2,500 metres and at St Malo, around 2,100 metres. With spending on Procap-3000, which started in 2000 and is due to run to the end of this year, expected to reach $0.645bn, programme manager Jacques Braile Saliés is confident Petrobras will