Petrobras’s P-79 floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel has left the Hanwha Ocean shipyard in South Korea and is due to arrive at the Búzios field in the pre-salt layer of the Santos Basin in February 2026.
The platform will be towed to its location with the crew on board, which will help speed up the start of production, according to the company.
“The arrival of the crewed platform, as was done with the P-78, has proven to be a successful strategy for reducing the time to start production,” said Renata Baruzzi, director of Engineering, Technology and Innovation at Petrobras.
“This is the eighth unit of the 12 planned for the field. Our expectation is that we will be able to anticipate the first oil by two months compared to what is planned in our Strategic Plan. This is yet another result of the dedication of the entire Petrobras team, combined with negotiations with suppliers, detailed planning and, above all, discipline to carry out what was planned,” he commented.
Production from the platform is scheduled to begin in August 2026 and will increase the current installed production capacity of the Búzios field by approximately 15.6% , to around 1.3mn bpd, taking into account the start of production of the P-78 in December of this year.
The Búzios field is located in ultra-deep waters of the Santos Basin (depth up to 2,100 meters), 180 km off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro, where six FPSOs are already producing: P-74, P-75, P-76, P-77, Almirante Barroso, and Almirante Tamandaré. In October, it became Petrobras' largest producing field, exceeding 1 million bpd. The P-79 project includes 14 wells, eight of which are producers and six are WAG injectors (alternating oil and gas injection technology).
The hull construction took place at Hanwha Ocean in Geoje-Si, South Korea, where the integration and commissioning of the topside modules, built in China, Brazil, South Korea, and Indonesia, also took place.
