Petrobras’ largest-producing oil & gas field richer for another FPSO

February 11, 2026, by Melisa Cavcic

Brazilian state-owned energy heavyweight Petrobras has welcomed the arrival of the eight floating production storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel, which will work at a field in the Santos Basin off the coast of Brazil.

FPSO P-79 is the eight of the 12 units planned for installation in the Búzios field and joins the seven others already in operation; Source: Petrobras

After leaving the South Korean shipyard in Geoje-Si in November 2025, the FPSO P-79 arrived at the pre-salt Santos Basin over the weekend and was towed to its location at the Búzios field with the crew on board, a strategy already used with the FPSO P-78 to reduce the time to start production.

The field is situated in ultra-deep waters of the Santos Basin with depth of up to 2,100 meters, 180 kilometers off the coast of the state of Rio de Janeiro. The FPSO P-79 is part of the Búzios 8 production development project, which includes 14 wells, comprising eight producers and six injectors.

Renata Baruzzi, Petrobras’s Director of Engineering, Technology and Innovation, commented: “Embarking the crew during the voyage to the location allows complex FPSO systems to be brought into operational condition without interrupting the continuity of the commissioning process, in addition to enabling team training.

“All of this speeds up the start of production. The next steps will be anchoring the unit and connecting it to the producing wells.”

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The latest FPSO is the eight of the 12 units planned for installation at the Búzios field, joining the seven vessels already in operation, including FPSOs: P-74, P-75, P-76, P-77, Almirante Barroso, Almirante Tamandaré, and P-78. With a production capacity of 180,000 barrels of oil, the FPSO P-79 can compress 7.2 million cubic meters of gas per day.

The unit was built by SAME Netherlands, a joint venture formed by Saipem and South Korea’s Hanwha Ocean, where the hull was constructed and the integration and commissioning of the topside modules was carried out, after being built in China, Brazil, South Korea, and Indonesia. The voyage from the shipyard to Brazil took approximately three months.

The Búzios field surpassed the milestone of 1 million barrels of oil produced per day in October 2025, becoming Petrobras’s largest-producing ultra-deepwater field. The consortium operating the field is composed of Petrobras (operator), its Chinese partners: CNOOC and CNODC, and PPSA, the company responsible for managing production sharing contracts.