Pump it Up!

‘The challenge is our energy’ is the catchy communist-style slogan used to motivate the 62,000 workers that oil the wheels of Brazil’s government-controlled energy giant, Petrobras.

After hitting the world’s largest oil discovery for three decades, investors have catapulted Petrobras into an elite group of the world’s five largest companies, overtaking the likes of General Electric, HSBC and Wal-Mart over the last 12 months.

The Brazilian economy is set to follow suit taking its place in the five richest global economies by 2015. The only small detail - the ‘challenge’ of extracting up to 35 billion barrels of oil and gas from the pre-salt deepwater oil fields up to 340 km from the coastline of Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Some of the deepest fields require drilling through 2,000 m of salt and another 3,000 m of rock to a depth of 7,000 m below sea level.

To do so a fleet of 45 giant semi-submersible oil platforms, some as high as a 34-storey building, as long as 10 Olympic-sized swimming pools and each costing a paltry $1.5 billion will be needed.

Under the leadership of the leftist president, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, these titanic, floating steel structures are being built in Brazil for the first time. The former metalworker handed the country’s shipbuilding heartland in Rio de Janeiro a huge boost in 2003 by insisting that up to 70% of the cost of constructing these rigs be spent in Brazil. The strategy has sparked an unprecedented U-turn in Brazilian industrial development in Rio de Janeiro, further south in Rio Grande do Sul and in Lula’s home state, Pernambuco.

The moribund cranes of shipyards in Rio de Janeiro and Niteroi mothballed at the turn of the century when the Brazilian shipbuilding industry had just 2,000 workers have been dusted off to aid a workforce that now numbers 45,000.

There are plans for another $7.8 billion of investment in up to nine new yards along Brazil’s 7,491 km coastline to cater for Petrobras spending of $111.4 billion for exploration of the pre-salt oil fields in the next 10 years.

Brazil’s richest man, Eike Batista, raised $1.6 billion in April to build his own shipyard in Santa Catarina where he will construct as many as 48 rigs and drilling ships for OGX, the oil exploration arm of his EBX empire (see p???).

The first predominantly local product of this black gold rush was the P-51, the world’s third largest floating production unit, finished at the ex-Verolme shipyard in Angra dos Reis in October 2008 and now producing 180,000 barrels of oil a day in the Marlim Sul oil field.

Working in waters 1,795 m deep, the P-51 was one of the most symbolic achievements of Brazilian industry in the last decade.

Completed a month after the collapse in financial markets it was held aloft as a towering symbol of Brazil’s immunity to the global crisis by president Lula. “Don't be afraid. You must have certainty that we have found our destiny,” the president told his people.

In the depths of the crisis, Petrobras has ploughed ahead with work on two more units at the same yard, the P-56 and P-57 as well as the P-53 and P-55 being assembled elsewhere.

While the ‘challenge’ continues to provide the ‘energy‘ for the 5,000 Brazilian workers toiling on each of these titans, Petrobras has received a little help from abroad.

Tucked away in a breath-taking part of the country where the Mata Atlantica descends into the sea interrupted only fleetingly by a string of stunning beaches and the exclusive holiday homes of the moneyed elites from Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the Angra dos Reis shipyard is a melting pot for global engineering excellence.

Owned by a Singaporean marine engineering specialist, Keppel FELS, working with French engineers, Technip, the P-56 is equipped with British Rolls-Royce motors, compressor units made by US conglomerate General Electric in Florence, Italy and a steel grid that connects four towering blocks designed by Norwegian group Aker. Brazil provides the vision, steel, sweat and hard currency.

From atop a lumbering 92 m crane charged with moving units of up to 600 tonnes, the ground appears to move below as seven other cranes lumber up and down slowly going about their business assembling what resembles a 50,000 tonne Meccano set spread across a mammoth 540,000 sq m playground.

Five thousand little figures scurry around in the sweltering, humid heat, welding a million components onto one of eight modules that have been lined up ready for the final stage of the rig’s assembly.

To the right, thousands of different sized tubes are laid out ready for the complicated process of ‘deck mating’ – the marriage of the topside to its base. Two energy producing units, four gas processing modules, a 15 m flare tower and living quarters for 200 people are joined first to the ‘deck box’ before being lowered by a floating crane onto four 43.4 m columns of cold, black steel that sit on each corner of a 96 m x 85 m frame that will, almost inexplicably, keep the expensive engineering kit afloat in waters up to 2,000 m deep for the next 25 years.

When one of the most complicated of engineering operations is completed later this year, the giant rig will be towed to an anchorage 124 km to sea, where it will begin its task to drain 100,000 barrels of black gold a day from wells 7,000 m below the sea surface, pumping up to $5bn a year into the Brazilian economy.