Christening Ceremony for Petrobras’ P-59 Jack-Up (Brazil)

Petrobras will christen platform P-59 at the São Roque do Paraguaçu yard, in Maragogipe (state of Bahia) on Friday, July 13. Scheduled to begin at 11 a.m., the christening ceremony will be attended by the President of Brazil, Dilma Rousseff, the Governor of the state of Bahia, Jaques Wagner, and Petrobras CEO, Maria das Graças Foster.

The P-59 is a self-raising drilling rig and will initially be assigned to the Peroá Profundo exploratory well, located in the Peroá field off the coast of Espírito Santo. The rig is capable of operating at sites with a water depth of 10 to 106 meters and drilling wells up to 9,144 meters long under elevated pressure and temperature conditions.

Petrobras invested some $360 million in building the platform, which was designed not only to meet the Company’s exploration and production operating schedules in the coming years, but also to provide support for a possible strategy of incorporating new exploratory blocks in shallow waters that are yet to be put out to bidding by the Brazilian National Petroleum Agency (ANP).

The platform

The P-59 comprises a floating hull weighing around 11,000 tonnes with three independent retractable legs each 145 meters long, which can be jacked up and down. Tug boats will position it at the site and the legs will rest on the seabed. Once positioned, the rig remains above the water level, distancing the hull and drilling equipment from the movement of the waves.

The P-59’s drilling gear will be assembled on the drilling deck, placed in a retracting movable structure that can be extended out from the platform. This means that the derrick can be moved both longitudinally and transversally, and a set of wells can be drilled without needing to relocate the platform.

 Construction

The P-59 was built at Petrobras’ São Roque do Paraguaçu yard, where the P-60 platform, identical to P-59, is also under construction and is expected to be completed by August. The construction contracts for both platforms were signed with the Rio Paraguaçu Consortium in September 2008. These platforms are included in the Federal Government’s Growth Acceleration Program (PAC).

At its peak, the construction work created some 2,100 direct jobs, half of which were filled by workers from the Recôncavo Baiano region, 25% from São Roque, 15% from elsewhere in the state of Bahia and 10% from other states. Completion of the P-59 is an important milestone for Brazilian shipbuilding and represents a resumption of domestic production of this type of platform. Similar self-raising platforms had not been built in Brazil for nearly 30 years.

P-59 Technical Specifications:

– Hull dimensions (length x width x height): 74.1 m x 62.8 m x 7.9 m

– Living quarters: 110 people

– Total weight: 11,000 tons

– Drilling length: 9,144 m

– Water depth at site: 10 to 106 m

– Unit legs and shoes: three 145-m legs with shoes 14 m in diameter

– Lifting system: Driven by five electric motors at each leg vertex

– Derrick (length x width x height) 11 m x 11 m x 52 m

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Press Release, July 13, 2012